Albuquerque City Councilors criticized Mayor Tim Keller’s office Monday night for the administration’s new process for addressing constituents’ emailed concerns, which some councilors said is superfluous and inefficient. The city, however, says it’s the most efficient way to track those emails.
Councilor Renée Grout said during the meeting that when she has forwarded constituent complaints and concerns to the administration, she gets a reply stating email has been forwarded to government affairs instead of the issue being addressed directly by a specific department.
“I am sad for people that are waiting for answers and it’s not that we’re not trying to help them, we’re waiting for the admin to reply,” Grout said. “I want everybody to know that we’re waiting on replies from the administration.”
One resident forwarded one such reply to City Desk ABQ, which reads, “I will forward this to the govaffairs@cabq.gov email address to ensure that our team gets an appropriate and timely response to your inquiry.”
“I know that if I’m getting 50 to 100 emails a day, everybody else is, I can only imagine how many emails that gov affairs is getting a day,” Grout said. “I just don’t think this is efficient. It’s not good customer service for the constituents. It’s not smart. I think there’s a lot of micromanaging in this policy. I understand what you’re trying to accomplish, but I don’t think it’s working.”
Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) Samantha Sengel told the council that the administration appreciates “the importance of timeliness” and is working to improve efficiency. Sengel said the governmental affairs team is “expediting any constituent relation or constituent inquiry so that it doesn’t get mixed up with other types of inquiries.”
Staci Drangmeister, a Keller spokesperson, told City Desk ABQ that the process is, in a way, a response to a bill the council passed in November that requires the administration to answer some questions in writing during the administration question-and-answer period during council meetings.
“Including the government affairs email on an inquiry is just one small way that the CAO can ensure that she’s getting answers to councilors and respecting their requests that she’s more responsive,” Drangmeister said.
During the meeting, Councilor Dan Lewis argued that questions from councilors on behalf of constituents should go directly to a specific city department since the governmental affairs team are not experts on the issues being addressed.
Lewis recounted a recent incident when his policy analyst contacted the Department of Municipal Development (DMD) about an “unsightly utility box” in his district, but the department responded with a similar email, saying they would forward the message to the governmental affairs team.
“It seems like what happened is it went to government affairs, then government affairs confirmed back, and probably got the answer back from DMD, the person that we wrote the email to,” Lewis said. “I would think that sending that email to government affairs and waiting on a response from them to be able to get back with us, to get back to the constituent, is just really pretty silly.”
Sengel said routing those emails through government affairs is the administration’s way of logging and tracking questions.
“It takes us just a few days to be responsive to any inquiry that is related to a constituent that’s asking a question about their neighborhood, their issue, their property, their needs…when something is going to take longer, and when I speak about reports or generating information, our goal is to also continue to let you all know when it will take longer,” Sengel said.
The only reason the responses are taking longer, Lewis said, is because the emails are being sent to governmental affairs which is keeping the city department employees from “doing their job.”
“It’s just an absolute waste of an email…I would ask you to rethink that. You might be thinking you’re solving a problem, but I think you’re creating a lot more issues,” Lewis said.
Drangmeister told City Desk ABQ that this process creates a record of questions for the administration and Sengel and it’s “not to gatekeep or to keep departments and subject matter experts from answering, but to really have a record and make sure that she’s able to say ‘yes, we answered this.’”
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