The name of the game here is "follow up". If no action appears to be taking place, try a different avenue. I know everyone loves using email these days, but there is no guarantee of email getting through. Sometimes you just have to smile and dial.
Mr Ken Gainger
General Manager
Ashfield Municipal Council
Ashfield NSW 1800
Dear Mr Gainger
Detection and reporting of graffiti etc in the Ashfield area
On Wednesday 6 August, I attempted to report some graffiti to Ashfield Council that I had discovered in the toilets at Richard Murden Reserve. For whatever reason, my email to your Customer Service Centre never made it through.
I went past the toilets again on Sunday and Monday and found that even more graffiti had been applied – the photos that I took can be seen here:
I rang the Ashfield Customer Service Centre on Monday and reported the problem, and a work order of some sort was raised on the spot to deal with it.
But that is not what I am writing about.
I think you have a serious flaw in how your staff and contractors are reporting problems with your assets, and you need to look into it.
According to a sign outside the toilets, they are locked each and every night. Presumably that means they also need to be unlocked each morning. Between the time when I first noticed the graffiti and when I rang Council, someone must have visited those toilets a dozen times to lock and unlock them, and yet they appear to have completely failed to notice graffiti right inside the doorway, and later, sprayed over the external walls.
I don’t know how often your public toilets are cleaned, but I would also assume that someone visited them to clean them at some point in the week between Wednesday evening and Tuesday morning. How could they perform their cleaning duties without noticing graffiti in considerable quantities on every internal surface?
Frankly, I am not interested in whether the person who is supposed to be locking the toilets is actually doing so on a daily basis, or whether they are being cleaned according to the required schedule. I am not looking for excuses either, so you don’t have to worry about finding out what went wrong and trying to write me a letter of explanation.
I am also not that interested in how long it took to remove the graffiti after I finally managed to report it. I don’t care why me email didn’t get through.
I am sure that Ashfield Council has some sort of system that staff can use to report infrastructure problems as they find them.
All that I am asking you to do is to re-iterate to your staff and contractors the necessity of reporting problems such as graffiti, and not treating it as somebody else’s problem. I am sure you will find that some people aren’t aware that such a system exists, others that know about it but don’t know how to use it or access it, and others that just couldn’t be bothered to use it.
I just want to know that when graffiti reappears on this toilet block, or other Council assets (as it surely will), or that when an assets starts to look rundown and in need of maintenance, that your staff will do the right thing and report it. That’s all I am after.
Yours sincerely
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