Maybe you squealed on a garbageman for bad driving, reported a meter maid for giving you too much attitude with that last parking ticket or even raised an ethics objection against a council member.
But if you used the City of Tacoma’s website to submit a conduct complaint about a city employee or elected official last month, better check on its status. It might have gone poof.
A programming glitch with the Tacoma’s online complaint management system caused an unknown number of citizen complaints to vanish during part of November, the city’s spokesman said last week.
“We don’t know exactly how many we missed,” spokesman Rob McNair-Huff said. “So we’re urging anyone who may have filed a complaint during that time frame to resubmit them.”
The technical problems occurred from Nov. 8-28. They were triggered when the city’s Web-based, fill-in-the-field complaint reporting system reached a milestone: its 1,000th submission.
The problem stemmed from the way city tech employees programmed the system more than six years ago: The maximum number of complaints that could be accepted was only 999.
“When the next person submitted their complaint, it would’ve looked to them like it had been accepted,” McNair-Huff said. “They would’ve gotten a complaint number that was either 000 or 001. But those complaints just went away.”
City officials who monitor the system weren’t aware of the 999-threshold, so didn’t realize complaint reports weren’t being generated for about three weeks, McNair-Huff added.
When a file attachment came through the system with no apparent corresponding complaint, “we wondered what this file was all about,” he said. “That alerted us to check out what happened.”
The city’s tech support crew have since reprogrammed the complaint web page to accept more reports, McNair-Huff said. The city also issued a press release asking citizens who may have submitted a report during the affected time-frame to resubmit them.
So far, only one report – a complaint about a police officer – has been resubmitted, McNair-Huff said. In all, the city received six complaint submissions in November – down from nine in October, he added.
“The number of reports ebb and flow from month to month,” McNair-Huff said. “Some (months) have more reports than others, so it’s really hard to tell how many we missed. But if it was anything like October, it could be as few as three.”
The city’s clunky online citizen complaint reporting system was set up in 2005 as part of a city effort to be more transparent and accountable in the wake of the scandal surrounding Police Chief David Brame, who killed his wife, Crystal, and himself. The system was meant to be only temporary, McNair-Huff said, but it has remained in place for 6½ years.
The system is set to be replaced in late February or early March with a more user-friendly system created by an outside vendor, McNair-Huff said. The new system will capture not only employee conduct complaints, but also general complaints about city services and reports about city-related problems, such as potholes or code enforcement violations.
“The biggest value to the public is that you will be able to see whether other people have reported the same problem you have,” McNair-Huff said. “You’ll also be able to track your complaint’s progress through the system, something you can’t do now.”
Lewis Kamb: 253-597-8542 lewis.kamb@thenewstribune.com blog.thenewstribune.com/politics Twitter: @lewiskamb
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