Basketball - a fast moving game with a sluggish administration

The headquarters of Basketball NSW has been a disgraceful mess for at least 6 months.  I contacted them last year, asking them to clean up their premises, and I got a response of "we'll look into it"

My compadre made contact again at the start of February, and got a query back asking where he was from.  It's now been 5 weeks since we heard from Daniel Martinez, the CEO of Basketball NSW, and nothing has been done.  If this was your business, could you imagine asking people to come to your office for a meeting if it looked like this?  I couldn't - it would be too embarrassing.  

Shame, shame, shame.  

$6.97 worth of doing good

A rubbish picker-upper, available at Bunnings for $6.97 in the power tools area.  I can't explain why they put them in with the power tools, but that's where I found this one.

Hopefully available at your local hardware store too.

Dis-semenating graffiti

Yes, I have deliberately mis-spelled the title to this post, since it is all about a local tagger known as "semen".  I wrote about him earlier this week after he left a trail of damage from Abbotsford to Five Dock.  Here is an example of his handiwork outside Envy Hair and Beauty (note that I took the photo to include their phone number, which is a reminder for me to call them so that they can de-semenate their premises).  

Semen gets around a bit - here are two examples from Homebush.  

Why am I making a big deal out of Mr Semen?

Because I am on a mission this week to ensure that every authority or utility that has been tagged by Mr Semen has reported it to the Police.  I know the council does that - there web based reporting system is hooked up to the Police, so any report that goes into it is automatically passed on to the Police.

Last week, Cheyene Back had her three month jail sentence overturned on appeal.

She immediately appealed against the severity of the punishment in the District Court - and yesterday won.

The original sentence had been, Judge Greg Hosking ruled, "unusual in the extreme".

After all, she had nothing on her criminal record, pleaded guilty straight away and had shown remorse. Judge Hosking took just 10 minutes to overturn the jail term.

If there is on thing about graffiti tagging that I have noted it is this - almost no one ever writes just one tag.  The evidence is all around us - just look at Mr Semen.  His tags cover at least 3 suburbs, and he's just starting out.

However, as far as the justice system is concerned, if he is ever caught, he can only be convicted based on the information presented to the court.  He's tagged property owned by Telstra, Australia Post, Energy Australia, Canada Bay Council and private businesses.  Let's assume he's put down 10 tags on 10 different properties, and only the tag on the Canada Bay Council property ends up being recorded in the graffiti system.  If he ends up before a judge, he'll be judged based on that one recorded tag, not the 10 that he's left scrawled up and down the street.  It's quite possible the judge will say it was a "one off" offense and Mr Semen has "no criminal record".

So I am going to be chasing up each of the utilities this week, asking them if they report each and every instance of graffiti that is left on their property. I've already started with Energy Australia.  It doesn't cut any ice with me when the CEO of a utility complains about the cost of graffiti, but then doesn't promulgate an internal policy stating that all graffiti must be reported without fail.  If they want to ensure that vandals are punished properly, then they need to ensure that as much data as possible is collected and collated in a single Police database.

Getting on top of things

I was having a chat with one of our councillors this week and mentioned that it looks like the graffiti truck is regularly visiting sites that get hit a lot, rather than waiting for a report to come in from residents.

He said that this is the case, and mentioned a site near Concord High School that was being hit again and again and again.  After repeated cleanups by the graffiti truck, the site is hardly being hit at all these days.  Once vandals learn that their handiwork will be quickly removed, and removed again and again and again, they give up.  Tagging starts to become a pointless and fruitless exercise.

How does the graffiti crew know that a site is being hit regularly, and therefore needs the pro-active, repeat treatment?

Simple - because that site is being regularly reported by residents. It's easy to run a report on the graffiti database, and work out which are the most graffiti-prone sites, and to then include them on a regular, weekly drive-by.

If only our utilities would take the same approach.

I reported a vandalised substation to Energy Australia on 28 Feb via their "contact us" web page.  I got this email today - over a week later:

Thank you for your enquiry regarding the graffiti on the substation in Barnstaple Rd Five Dock.

Your enquiry has been forwarded to the responsible area for their attention and is being processed.

The Notification Number for your request is 500067105  and all follow up enquiries should be made to our Contact Centre on 131535.

Yours sincerely,

At least I got a response, but it shouldn't have taken this long to process it.  I thought the idea of web-enabling things was to speed them up.  It looks like it's faster to go the old fashioned route, and make a phone call.  It might even be faster to post them a letter.

Cleaning up vandalism is not the core business of utilities, which is why it sits so low on their list of priorities.  If they outsourced the cleaning up to council, the site probably would have been repainted by Tuesday.  Instead, it will probably take them another month to get a painting crew around to cleanup the substation, which is sub-optimal to say the least.  

If you think this is madness, just remember that the idea of getting councils to clean graffiti on things like substations was proposed in Parliament last year, and rejected by the current government.  Our local member, Angela D'Amore, is on record as having voted against what most would see as a very sensible proposition.

We need some of this

Camouflaged utility boxes.

Thanks to the very clean and tidy ShadowLands.

Bashing your head against the railways

Latest letter to RailCorp:

24 February 2009

Mr Ben Johnson

General Manager

Ministerial Correspondence and Customer Relations

RailCorp

PO Box K349

Haymarket NSW 1238

Dear Mr Johnson

Removal of graffiti from railway structures in Leichhardt

I refer to my letters of 13 May 2008, 11 October 2008 and 12 November 2008 and your subsequent responses.

I don’t believe that I received a reply to my letter of 12 November.  I did receive a survey last month asking me to comment on your performance, but a substantive response to my concerns has not been forthcoming.

Let me recap briefly for you:

1. On 13 May 2008, I wrote to you requesting that you paint over the graffiti on the overbridge at Charles St in Leichhardt

2. Six months later, after noticing that nothing had been done, I wrote to you again – this time asking that a work order be lodged in Ellipse

3. Your response in essence said that nothing could be done without a closedown

4. I wrote back and asked for the date of the next closedown, and never got a response

5. I also contacted Leichhardt Council as you suggested.

Therefore, I am following up to see where things stand.

1. Has RailCorp been contacted by Leichhardt Council with regard to this bridge, and what position has RailCorp taken in regard to having the graffiti removed?

2. Is this line still operational, and if so, when is the next scheduled closedown?

3. Assuming that a closedown has been programmed for 2009, has graffiti removal been inserted into the program of works?

4. If this line is no longer operational, I presume that a closedown is not required, and therefore the graffiti can be removed at any time.  If that is the case, why has nothing been done for the last 9 months?

5. What action has your department taken to pass on my request to the appropriate area within the Asset Management division?  The twelve month anniversary of my first letter is fast approaching, and depending on your response to this last question (assuming you bother to respond), I will decide whether to FOI the entire file regarding this correspondence.  

I don’t particularly want to go through the FOI process – I just want RailCorp to remove the graffiti in question.  Is that too much to ask?

Yours sincerely

---------------------

There are a few things that I am trying to clarify with RailCorp in regard to their actions so far; mainly, have they actually thought about cleaning away the graffiti on the bridge in question, or are they just sending me canned responses?

In one of my earlier letters, I asked for the Ellipse work order number.  RailCorp uses an Enterprise Resource Management system (ERM) called Ellipse, which comes from a Queensland company called Mincom.  Earlier versions of Ellipse were called MIMS.  Ellipse is like SAP or Oracle Financials - it is an enormous bit of expensive, integrated software that is used to run the HR, finance, asset management and asset maintenance functions of big companies.  Mincom started by writing this software for mining companies, and it is now used by all the big electricity and water authorities, as well as most railways.

RailCorp uses Ellipse to track every maintenance work order for trains and track.  Everything that the maintenance staff do is controlled by Ellipse.  If you don't have a job programmed in Ellipse, nothing gets done.  This is why I specifically asked for the Ellipse work order number - it's proof that it will be taken care of at some point.  Since Mr Johnson skated over that request and didn't supply a number, I can only assume that someone, somewhere in RailCorp has decided to do nothing - they just don't have the guts to say that to my face.

[I know about Ellipse because I bought the server that ran MIMS for the Rail Access Corporation, participated in the upgrade from MIMS to Ellipse, and had to rollout and support the MIMSMUI, which was the interface that staff used on their PC's to access MIMS.  I also sat a few feet away from the MIMS/Ellipse administrators, and drank beer with them, so I know a little bit about it.  I still run into them from time to time when I walk past the building that I used to work in, as they are generally out the back having a smoke together.]

I then asked for the date of the next closedown of the rail line in question.  Mr Johnson feels that the bridge can only be cleaned up during a closedown, which is true for busy rail lines.  You don't want staff running out between trains with a paint brush - it's too risky.  Much better to close the line to all traffic, then do the work in safety.  If you are a train user and you've heard that buses have replaced trains, then that's because a closedown is in progress and no trains are running.  Closedowns are planned months in advance, and involve a  hell of a lot of work - because they are few and far between, every engineering group wants access to that bit of track to do their maintenance and upgrades.  Co-ordinating all the work is a massive task.  

[I know about that too - just before I left RailCorp, they were looking at rolling out a bit of project management software called Primavera to help with the planning, and I setup the servers that were used for development and testing and installed Primavera on them.  I've spent a small amount of time out in the field with the engineers, watching them planning closedowns.  Unless Mr Johnson comes from a background in rail maintenance, I can safely bet that I know more about them than he does.]

If a closedown is planning for this line, it shouldn't be too hard to find out the date.  And it also shouldn't be too hard to find out whether cleaning this bridge has been put into the bucket of work for that closedown.  But once again, that question was skated over, meaning that no closedowns are planned (because this line is practically unused these days), or one has been planned, but no one has bothered to put cleaning this bridge into the project.

If the line gets next to no traffic - say a train a week - then you don't need a closedown to do the work.  The maintenance crews can organise with train control to block the track off for a while so they can get a clear run at cleaning it up.  If that's the case, then Mr Johnson has been rather disingenuous in his response - the closedown excuse is just a smokescreen for doing nothing.

All track maintenance work at RailCorp is undertaken or managed by the Asset Management Division - this is a huge department with thousands of staff scattered all over the metro area.  I am tempted to FOI the file relating to this case just to see whether anyone in the MCCR has actually bothered to talk to anyone in the Asset Management Division or not.  I'd be pretty ticked off if I discovered that the MCCR had not bothered to talk to the manager responsible for this bit of track and find out whether cleaning this bridge was feasible and a priority or not.  If there is one thing I can't stand, it's being bullshitted to.  

There should be an email conversation between the MCCR staff and the Asset Management Division - and that won't be too hard to find.  For you see, in my last year at RailCorp, I was part of a small team that installed a software product from Veritas called Vault, and Vault has an archiving feature where every single email sent to or from anyone at RailCorp goes into a permanent archive, from which nothing is ever deleted.  I also had to buy several terabytes of storage to cope with all the emails that needed archiving.  

Vault has a nifty enterprise search feature, so doing an FOI search should be a doddle for a Vault administrator with the right access (and that person used to be me).  It's great for doing discovery in legal cases.  If emails have been sent, we'll soon get to the bottom of the story.

I also had a hand in putting in the records management system that RailCorp uses, so I know that retrieving the file should be a piece of cake.

I'll decide what course to take once I get a response from Mr Johnson - assuming I get one by the end of March.  I'll give him 5 weeks to work out what to do, then put in the FOI request.  It's been 16 years since I last saw an MCCR file - I might just FOI mine for old time's sake.

Navigating the bureaucracy

I have three examples today of the problems that you can strike when trying to navigate through government bureaucracies.

The cabinets below belong to Jemena, who looks after gas pipelines in NSW.  They've been vandalised previously, and Jemena repainted them last year.  I rang the Jemena manager responsible for them today and told him about the latest layer of vandalism.  He was less than impressed.  He's going to get them repainted, and we had a chat about whether it would be better to have a mural painted on them rather than simply splashing a coat of green paint over them.  Murals seem to work most of the time (although there is always one idiot in every crowd who will vandalise a mural), and he's going to see if he can get a mural put on these cabinets.

That was his idea by the way, not mine.  However, before he can paint a mural on them, he has to get approval from the local council which in this case is Leichhardt Council.  Most of the councillors in Leichhardt give the impression that they are more concerned with events in Gaza instead of fixing pot holes in their local streets, so I hope Jemena can get approval to paint these cabinets the way they want to before Christmas comes.  

How insane is that though?  A company needing council approval for the colour scheme of its equipment cabinets.  It's a wonder anything gets done in this country.

RailCorp have already used Leichhardt Council as an excuse for not painting this bridge.  The last letter I got from them stated that they'd have to get council approval to close the road to paint it etc etc, implying that it was a very large and complex and costly job, and therefore hoping that I would take the hint and let them off the hook.  Of course everyone knows that councils are impossible to deal with, and getting approval for anything takes light years, so RailCorp can simply ignore the problem and blame council if anyone kicks up a stink.  Nice.  It's the government version of the "dog ate my homework" excuse.

My third example of navigating the bureaucracy.  There are floating rubbish traps on the canals that empty into the harbour.  This one clearly has a broken boom, which would allow rubbish to float past the trap and end up in the belly of passing sharks - which might not be a bad thing.

I rang NSW Maritime, assuming that they would be the ones that take care of these things.  It turns out that all they do is empty the traps - Sydney Water are responsible for repairing and maintaining them.  NSW Maritime had noticed that the boom was broken before I rang, and have tied it off, and reported it to Sydney Water.  I sometimes wonder whether we are living in a Monty Python movie.

div>

Well, how about that?

I'll say this until I am blue in the face - if you report graffiti on a council asset within the Canada Bay area, you can bet your bottom dollar it will be removed within a few days.  Today is Friday.  I reported graffiti on this bus shelter (and two others) on Tuesday.  It's gone.  I don't know when it was removed - today was the first time that I went back since Tuesday.  The council turnaround time is impressive - if you report it.

I also noticed this (and other) graffiti in Five Dock Park near the war memorial on Tuesday.  I hadn't gotten around to reporting it, when I went back today and found that it was gone.  

Same goes for graffiti on the grandstand.

One of two things is happening:

• Another resident has decided to start reporting graffiti as well, and they beat me to it, or
• Council have worked out that these sites are hit often - sometimes weekly - and therefore a weekly patrol by the anti-graffiti truck is a good idea.  In other words, council is be pro-active rather than reactive.

Either outcome is good. 

I just wish other organisations, like Energy Australia, Telstra, RailCorp and Australia Post would also start taking a pro-active approach to graffiti, rather than sitting around and waiting for the phone to ring.

Process, process, process

There are processes that work well, and make life easier; and there are processes which barely work, and make life a misery for all and sundry.

The process for registering a car in NSW is an example of a process that works quite well - the RTA has put a lot of effort into making the process as effortless as possible for the motorist - they want to make it as easy as possible for you to give them money in return for a registration sticker.

If your car is over 5 years old, you take it to a mechanic for a safety check.  The mechanic logs the results of the safety check into the RTA system over the internet.  You then take out 3rd party insurance via the insurer of your choice, which can also be done over the internet - and the insurer sends your details to the RTA electronically within the hour.

You then visit the RTA website and pay the registration fee, and that it is - your car is now registered.  It's expensive, but it is hassle-free.  The system handles millions of registration transactions per year.

The system that our council has for graffiti reporting and management is also pretty good.  It's easy to register an item of graffiti on line.  The system emails you the job number, so you can track progress on line if you want to.  I don't know how the system manages dispatching council staff to cleanup jobs, but when they attend to a site, they photograph it before doing anything and upload the photos to the system.  

I understand that the graffiti system is then interfaced somehow with the Police, so every organisation that is using it is automatically adding to a state-wide database of graffiti tags.  When a vandal is caught, if the system is used properly, the Police should be able to charge them with multiple offences, not just the one that they were caught doing red-handed.  It helps to sort the first-time taggers from the serial pests.

The system isn't perfect.  It doesn't email you when the job has been actioned (ie, the graffiti has been removed).  It would be nice to get some feedback that something has been done about it, rather than living in hope that someone has taken action.  But it seems to work, and work well, and I can live with what we've got.

Not all council processes are as good as this one.  I sometimes get the feeling that some of their other online systems aren't being monitored, so jobs that residents submit end up ignored in a dusty corner somewhere (the tree lopping system is an example of that).  However, the graffiti management process seems to be pretty good from my perspective.

Contrast this with the process used by the Education Department.  If staff notice graffiti on school property (which is a very big if), they start by notifying the Police via the Police Assistant Line (PAL).  This is actually a pretty good service - I've had to use it once or twice, and I've visited one of the Police call centres on the Central Coast that provide the service - it was the nicest call centre that I've ever laid eyes on (and I've seen a few).  

Contacting the Police isn't that hard, but it can be time consuming.  Once an event number is provided, the school (probably the Principal) has to contact the insurance company and lodge a claim - and if you have ever dealt with an insurance company, you know how bad that can be.  Once that's done, the school has to contact Spotless, who have the contract for school maintenance.  I've rung the Spotless help desk, and dealing with them was a pretty thankless experience.  

The Council system and the Education Department system can be summarised as follows:

• Straightforward, simple Council system vs compex, convoluted Education system
• On-line Council system with minimal inputs vs phone contact with lots of input required
• Fast Council process vs time-consuming Education process
• One stop shop Council system vs many non-interfaced systems in the Education Department model
• "Any idiot can use it" Council system vs only "those in the know can use it" Education system

Is it any wonder then that Council can have graffiti removed in less than 24 hours, whilst it can take the Education Department 24 weeks to achieve the same result?  This is an area that is crying out for a bit of process re-engineering.

Sign of the times

Corner of Day St and Formosa St in Drummoyne - although you'd never know where you are, given that the sign over the road has been bent badly out of shape.  

Just some kids I guess, having fun, wrecking things that the ratepayers have to pay to replace.

How much less in tax would you and I have to pay if things were simply allowed to wear out naturally, rather than being deliberately destroyed again and again and again?

One of my favourite views

This is a stitched together photo showing our newly opened, and vandalised, Fitness First gym.  To be fair to Fitness First, the property was vandalised well before they moved in.  It's been like this for months, and Time Realty, the property manager, hasn't done anything about it (I rang them before Christmas and asked them to clean it up).

If it was my business, I wouldn't have signed the lease without the property being tidied up first.  The extensive graffiti around the building does not reflect well on Fitness First as a brand.  

But lo, what is that in the distance, across the road?  (You will need to click on the photo to see who occupies the office directly opposite).  

They're tough in Bondi

The parents who send their kids to Bondi Public School have a "take no prisoners" approach to people dumping rubbish in or around the school grounds.  Take this photo from Andrew W:

They not averse to picking up after slobs either.

Writing to your MP

I've recieved an email asking for help on dealing with government.  I have attached three responses from various sources regarding the failure to deal with graffiti at Drummoyne Public School.  

The first is a response from the Department of Education to my compadre, who wrote to the Department on 14 January regarding this issue.  He got a response less than 4 weeks later, and the graffiti was cleaned up before this letter was sent.

Coincidentally, a day earlier, I had written to my local MP, Angela D'Amore about exactly the same thing (although my compadre and me email each other from time to time with information on what we are doing, we don't exactly co-ordinate our actions).  Since Angela didn't bother responding after three weeks (not even an acknowledgement letter), I gave up hope of getting a response and wrote directly to the Minister for Education.  Her response is below - note that it is almost exactly the same as the response my compadre got (which is not surprising - why rewrite a letter when the original is good enough).  

The Minister sent her letter back via Angela's office, which also doesn't surprise me.  Normal protocol is that if you write to your MP, the MP will forward it on to the Minister responsible for a reply.  However, when they do that, they always write back to you to say, "thanks for your letter, I have asked the Minister for X for a response, and will forward it to you as soon as I get it".  

Angela's staff must have missed that lesson in protocol.

Here starts the lesson:

In Angela's last paragraph, she suggests that in future, I make contact via the telephone or email.  I strongly suggest you don't do that.  MP's get bombarded with SPAM, and there is a good chance your email will become lost in the deluge.  Spend the 55 cents to post it.  Emails also tend to be written in haste - so take your time and write and a letter with care.  

Whatever you do, never make a phone call alone.  There's a good chance nothing will ever come of it.  Put your concerns down on paper.  Paper leaves a trail; it has to be filed.  It's very hard to ignore paper, and you have a clear and concise record of what you said.  Note that in this case, I was able to reprint the letter that I had sent to Angela, and then re-send it to the Minister for Education - and only then did I get a response.

A new kid in town

Today, I have the dubious pleasure of introducing you to a new tagger in our neighbourhood - a spunky little twerp with the tag 'semen'.  I'm not kidding.  'semen' has appeared in at least a dozen locations in Abbotsford and Five Dock over the last week.  I photographed 8 of his efforts today, and have laid them out in Google Maps.  I didn't bother photographing all his tags in the Five Dock shops area.  As you can see, the photos below are stretched out nearly along Great North Road, and they continue off the bottom of the screen into the Five Dock shopping area.  I guess our bright young lad left home one morning with a desire to get something to eat, and then tagged every public edifice along the way.

A post box.

A bus stop.

A real estate sign.

Another bus stop, this one outside a primary school.

Signage on the fence of the same primary school.

A Telstra phone box.

Another post box.

Yet another bus stop.

That gives a sum total of:

• One real estate sign
• One phone booth
• One school sign
• Two post boxes
• Three bus stops

The bus stops are the responsibility of Council - they are easy to get fixed, since our Council is on the ball.  The post boxes are probably a write off - Australia Post is fairly useless at responding.  It's easier for me to go down there with a bottle of metho and a rag and clean them myself.

The school sign should be reasonably straight forward - although I have never dealt with this school before, so I don't know how on the ball the Principal is.

The real estate sign may or may not be too hard - some agents care a lot, and others not at all.  After all, the client paid for it, so why should they bother what condition it is in?

These tags have all been here for some days, and although they could be classed as offensive, nothing has been done about removing them - because no one has bothered reporting them.

It still gets right up my nose that buses stop at these three bus stops numerous times every day, yet Sydney Buses feels that it has no obligation as a good corporate citizen to report the damage to the local council.  Pathetic really - even worse given that Sydney Buses is a government authority.

The same goes for the post boxes - a postie empties these once a day, yet clearly Australia Post employs deem it not part of their duties to report graffiti on Australia Post assets.  How sad is that?

Similarly, Telstra have to send someone around every so often to clean the coins out of the phone booth, yet the people doing it never seem to notice the attendant graffiti.

As for the school, teachers drive past that sign each day as they arrive for work, yet none appear to have noticed it.  They clearly care a lot.

Note though that in order to get this lot cleaned up, I have to make the following reports:

• One report to council for the bus stops
• One report to Telstra
• One report to Australia Post
• One report to the school
• One report to the real estate agent

And you wonder why it takes so long to get graffiti removed!  Australia Post, the Education Department and Telstra won't let Council clean their property, so instead of getting Council to immediately clean 7 out of these 8 sites in one go, we have to go through the tedium of reporting it to this group and that group and someone else.  Council will deal with it immediately, the school in an unknown timeframe, Australia Post in maybe 3 months and Telstra - who knows, if ever?

It's so easy for little idiots to apply, yet so difficult to legally remove.  Talk about fighting a battle with both hands tied behind your back!

An experiment in not "complaining"

I've had a few comments from nutters stating that I should stop "complaining".

Well, too bad. After thinking about your feedback, I have decided the following:

• I am not an architect, so I cannot design beautiful buildings for our city
• I am not an artist, so I can't create artworks that lift the spirits and please the eye
• I am not a green thumb, so I can't plant gardens that soothe the soul and cool the temperament
• I am not an engineer, so I can't fix our roads and footpaths
• In short, there is not much that I can personally do to physically improve our quality of life

I am however a great complainer. It was what I was born to do. I have worked in the belly of the beast, spending a year penning responses to people complaining to CityRail, so I think I know complaining inside out. I have dealt with a wider variety of complaints (and nutters) than you can possibly comprehend. I have been trained by experts, and have worked with the craftsmen of complaints. My manager at the time was the doyen of flak-catchers, the zen master of complaints management, the guru of grumpiness.

During my time there, I happened to introduce the idea of the form letter to CityRail - my subsequent dealings with RailCorp can be thought of as punishment for my sins.

But as a sop to those who believe that "complaining" is unnecessary, and that councils will find and fix things without anyone telling them that a problem exists, I have devised an experiment.

On the weekend, I spotted two things that I would normally report to Canada Bay Council - graffiti reappearing on a target that gets hit almost every weekend, and a large and rapidly growing pot hole on a busy street.

I spotted the graffiti on Sunday. In the past, I have usually reported graffiti like this via the council's anti-graffiti website on the weekend, and the anti-graffiti team has removed it by close of business on Monday. I have sometimes seen them at it first thing on Monday morning. There is a very short time lag between reporting and action. You tell Council, they fix. Simple as that.

Pot holes can take a little longer - perhaps a week - between reporting and filling in.

Today is Tuesday. I went past the graffiti this morning, and it is still there. Imagine that - no one has reported it, and nothing has been done about it. Funny that. I'm still waiting for Council's magic eyeball in the sky to spot it and report it.

Same goes for the pot hole. I drove over it again this morning with the usual suspension breaking crunch.

I'm going to wait until next Monday, and then I'll report both problems and time how long it takes to fix them.

If that doesn't convince the "stop moaning, you whinging bastard" crowd, nothing will. All I can suggest then is that they start taking their medication again and go back to drooling in the corner.

Cleaning up Bondi

From my old Bondi flatmate Penny comes these photos of the efforts of her friend, Andrew W, to keep the neighbourhood up to scratch.  

Andrew's pet hates appear to be dumped furniture and, erm, other things.

Andrew regularly emails photos of dumped furniture to Waverly Council along with a request to have it removed.

Brown vs Green

Leichhardt Council is easily the greenest council in the inner west - if not Sydney. By that, I mean it has the greatest number of councillors from the Greens political party.

Many parts of the Leichhardt Council area though are an absolute eyesore - almost as if Greens have a blind spot when it comes to "brown" issues.

We normally think of "brownfield" sites as former industrial sites that are no longer occupied and which have become severely dilapidated.

When I think of "brown", I think of the "unnatural" or urban environment - large concrete storm water drains, concrete or tarmac roads, concrete or steel bridges, concrete footpaths, brick or concrete walls, metal substations, metal pipelines, wooden fences, metal street light poles, metal control boxes for traffic lights, the glass of shop fronts, footpath furniture like metal rubbish bins, sign posts and metal seats. All these make up the "brown" environment - an environment that few people will ever hug. Even fewer will noisily march down George St waving placards and chanting to save this environment (unless it has some heritage value).

If we are to have things like concrete storm water drains cutting through our suburbs, let us at least make them as attractive as possible, rather than ugly, eyeball-searing canvases displaying the uncivilised nature of our least polished residents.

I find it funny that so many Greenies choose to live in the Leichhardt Council area, which has one of the smallest amounts of open green space of any council area in NSW. They choose to live in cramped, brick rabbit hutches with tiny or non-existent yards in the middle of a concrete jungle. By my reckoning, Leichhardt is one of the "brownest" environments around. How odd is that?

The brown environment is the neglected environment. It is the stuff of unloved authorities like Telstra, Australia Post, the RTA, RailCorp and the energy and water companies; and of local government, which many residents profess to hate, or treat as useless.

Many government authorities care little for presentation when it comes to taking care of their assets. So long as a bridge is standing, or a pipe is not leaking, or electricity is flowing along a wire, then all is good. Way down the list of corporate priorities is the idea of having "good looking" infrastructure. Keeping it working is hard enough, and engineers are a notoriously anti-social bunch, not much given to the concept of aesthetics. Beautification is for chicks, and most of these authorities are the last redoubt of the Pauline Hanson-voting blue collar male.

I choose to care about the brown environment because it is the area of the unmentionables. All the trendoids have long joined the green camp, and I don't blame them. Swimming with dolphins is far more pleasurable than swimming with turds.

But someone has to take an interest in it, and it might as well be me.

Clean Up Australia Day

Canada Bay is a city with an enormous amount of waterfront - and that waterfront attracts plenty of rubbish.  The canals that feed into the harbour have floating rubbish traps on them to collect the plastic bottles and cans and plastic bags that would otherwise flow into the harbour.  

But plenty more rubbish ends up in the harbour - some blown in from overflowing rubbish bins or carelessly dropped, and some deliberately tossed into the harbour.

630,000 people turned out today to help cleanup their bit of Australia - that's over 5% of the population.  Most of the sites in our area only needed people for 2 hours or so, which is all I put in.  I joined a crew of half a dozen clearing mainly broken glass from muddy mangrove flats.  An earlier crew had concentrated on plastic bottles, leaving us free to concentrate on the remains of dozens and dozens of smashed beer bottles lining the mangroves.

There is clearly no shortage of people who want to keep Australia beautiful, and the number who turnout on the first weekend in March each year continues to grow.  

If people are willing to spend part of their Sunday with perfect strangers picking used syringes and used condoms and broken glass out of a sea of mud, then I hope I can convince some of them to start noticing and reporting other things that need taking care of.

Anyone can pick up rubbish, but generally only council or RTA road workers can fill in pot holes for instance.  I can't fill in the newly emerged monstrous pot hole on Barnstaple Road for instance - but I can ring Council in the morning and tell them about it.  

And why should I do that?  

Because I had a councillor sitting on my lounge on Friday night, drink in hand, telling me that Council as a rule can't fix pot holes that it doesn't know about.  

It's bleeding obvious to him, and bleeding obvious to me, but apparently still not bleeding obvious to a lot of other people.  Roads don't have sensors in them that send a signal back to headquarters when a pot hole opens up.  

If you care about "quality of life" issues in your local area, and you see something that needs fixing, then you need to be prepared to take the next step and tell someone about it - your council, the RTA, Telstra - whoever.  Don't expect somebody else to take care of it for you.  

Thousands of tonnes of rubbish were collected today.  None of that would have happened if everybody in Australia thought that it was somebody else's responsibility to take care of it.  

Addiction and punishment

Here we have a local electricity substation that has been vandalised.  I reported this to Energy Australia around 6 months ago, but it was never cleaned up.  I might have given them the wrong substation ID, or the job simply went walkabout.  This building is on a reasonably major road, and is right next to a large residential development.  It is not hidden away in a backwater somewhere, out of the eye of the public.  Even so, it has been left to steadily deteriorate at the hands of vandals.  This building will continue to degenerate unless someone reports it (don't worry, I reported it again yesterday).

Have a look at this close up - note the tag of "oats".  Mr Oats is a fairly prolific tagger in this area.  I assume he is male, since most vandals are male, and most are also under the age of 18.  Mr Oats has a prodigious work ethic, which unfortunately has been misdirected into a socially destructive behaviour.  I assume he is under 17, because his work spans a small geographic area, indicating that he is stuck with walking everywhere.  He is too young to drive.

Mr Oats clearly enjoys his work, because he leaves it everywhere.  I presume he gets a big kick out it - a natural high from an endorphin rush - and because of that, he is addicted to tagging.  He is the equivalent of a packet a day smoker - he's psychologically and physically hooked, and he won't give up easily.  Tagging gives his life meaning.  If you ask me, his life must be miserable for this sort of thing to give him meaning, but each to his own.

This is why I think harsher penalties for tagging won't work.  I'm not saying that I don't like harsh penalties - what I am saying is that it is extremely unlikely that Mr Oats will be caught, and even if he is caught, the Police are likely to hand out a caution because of his age.  Even if they do go the whole hog and take him to court, he'd have to be exceptionally unlucky to draw a "hanging and flogging" magistrate, and thus end up behind bars.  Community service is the most likely outcome, given that there is little point in slapping a $2200 fine on a 15 year old boy with no money and no job.  That's the opinion that I have drawn from reading crime statistics for the last few years.  The facts on those arrested, charged and jailed speak for themselves.

I can see that Mr Oats is shaking in his boots following the recent passing of tougher legislation - not.  He faces almost no chance of getting caught, because it is simply not a priority to the Police.  If they do catch him, he's unlikely to go to court.  If he does go to court, the likelihood of prison is extremely remote.  A light slapping with a wet lettuce leaf is the worst case.

I'm sure his greatest concern at the moment is where he can steal his next stash of spray cans from.

This is why I concentrate on the clean-up angle.  The government can posture and talk tough and throw around harsh penalties, but in the end, all we want is this muck removed.  And it will never get removed unless it's reported.

Complaints, complaints, complaints

I don't get a lot of comments on this blog (or an awful lot of traffic), but a number of people have commented that I should essentially "stop complaining to council".

I'd like to draw a distinction between a "complaint" and a "report".

If you are burgled and you ring the Police, you are making a report, not a complaint.

If you suffer a heart attack and ring for an ambulance, you are making a report, not a complaint.

If your house is on fire and you ring the fire brigade, you are making a report (or more likely, yelling for help), not a complaint.

If you are unhappy with the service that these agencies provide - ie, you die before the ambulance arrives, then you may write to them later and complain about it.  However, the initial contact that you make with them is a report.  It is an exchange of information.

Many government agencies can be thought of as machines that need to be fed.  We feed them information, and they churn it around and produce services - an ambulance ride, a filled pot hole, a welfare payment, and half burnt house.  They only work when we, the public, feed them with information.  The ambulance services do not have ambulances prowling the streets looking for victims to collect.  The fire brigades don't go door to door asking if you have a fire that needs putting out.  

They've all setup contact centres (or call centres) which have one purpose and one purpose only - to collect information from the public and to pass it onto their front line staff.

Councils are no different.  They all have a contact centre or service centre of some sort (it might be simply a beefed up reception desk) for taking phone calls, and many now have some sort of web based e-forms system for accepting information from residents.  They range from the very good to the utterly appalling, but most councils are doing their best to streamline the process of gathering and processing this information.

The Australian Graffiti Register system that many councils are now using is a case in point.  It is available internally within councils, so that staff who see graffiti when they are out and about can report it, and it is available to the general public as well.  If councils weren't interested in gathering information on graffiti from the public, why would they bother to make this system publicly available?  

The fact is, council staff can't be everywhere at once.  Who is best placed to report a pot hole in your street - someone that lives there (like yourself), or a council employee that lives on the other side of the suburb?  

Councils do not have a "magic eye in the sky" that automatically spots and reports all pot holes, blocked drains, broken signs, abandoned cars, dead trees, collapsed footpaths, dumped rubbish and graffiti.  The only eyes it has are yours and mine.  If you won't use yours, don't come complaining to me about the state of your neighbourhood.