Facebook #Fail

The best of all is our Facebook page. If social media is the future of our online communications, and Facebook is the hub of social sharing, shouldn’t Facebook be the crux of our social media effort? Imagine the possibilities of using our Facebook page to inform stakeholders direct from the City Manager. Or to encourage neighborhood residents to come together to address quality-of-life issues. Our department heads could apprize us about their efforts to make life better in Beverly Hills. Or even tap into the conversation in real time to clarify, say, when our particular street might be paved if a resident voices concern. With a social media platform like Facebook we can only imagine the possibilities!

After all, friction-less civic engagement is the holy grail for good government advocates, where total availability of public information and real-time engagement facilitates and encourages participation.

But the good government & transparency folks won’t find much to praise here in Beverly Hills. Our Facebook page is yet another half-hearted social media effort that only recycles event announcements and PR cruft. Instead of communicating about important policies, City Hall staffers post about that most important of city policies – poop-scooping.

Perhaps actual participation – clicking that ‘like’ button – is some measure? (That’s the Facebook metric, at least.) Well, our Facebook page has been up and running for two full years, yet our city of 35,000 residents (probably half of us on Facebook) have coughed up only a thousand ‘likes’ total in that time. And no individual item has netted more than 25 ‘likes.’ The average? Only about three. By that measure, even the city’s informative ‘Do Your Doo-ty’ post (with five ‘likes’) even bests that average.

But it’s not the residents’ ‘likes’ that concern us. Rather it is several very profound dislikes posted by our Facebook page’s most prolific contributor, resident Scott Huff, that attracted our attention.

Scott seems to love hating on our city. “You are criminals! Your parking enforcement policies are unconscionable!” he huffs. That’s because he’s forking over $260/year for a resident parking pass (which he thinks is akin to extortion). Evidently his residential premises don’t afford enough off-street parking, so he pays up for a permit. Like so many.

The kicker, he says, is that non-residents can park free on his block, but Scott (the resident) not only pays dearly for a pass but often must park in an adjacent permit zone. That’s because he’s crowded out by parkers from the Robertson commercial district. To his chagrin, he found out that his hard-earned $260 permit is no protection against a ticket in the other zone. Adding insult, that cost has climbed as the city digs itself out of a deficit.

We’ve been there Scott: we’ve fought with Transportation over the lack of curbside capacity near a commercial district. We’ve complained about ever-higher fines. And for years we’ve see poor suckers like you (and us) ticketed because permit practice hasn’t kept up with the reality of too-high parking demand in residential areas. And our Transportation Division’s signage policies leave a lot to be desired too. We feel your pain!

The Facebook Bullhorn

Now, after five years of city disregard, he’s not remaining silent any longer. Time to take to the old bullhorn on Facebook!

Now, you might think a responsive small city would feel the heat and simply communicate with frustrated residents like Scott. Perhaps a social media staffer could give somebody in City Hall the heads up to call this guy – that he has a problem that needs attention. (As a permit holder, his contact info on file with the city.)

Sure, why not straighten these problems out before they escalate? Instead our city hunkers down defensively; there’s only silence from our Transportation folks on Facebook. But that’s no surprise: Transportation is part of Public Works, the least responsive department in the city – one that can’t even be bothered to post its commission meeting agenda online or update its city webpage with minutes or audio in a timely fashion. Why would they reach out to Scott on Facebook?

But it gets worse: the page administrator pruned Scott’s comments from the page – a sure recipe for escalation. And sure enough, in the last couple of days it did escalate.  “I see you deleted my thoughtful and fair post,” Scott stews. Why wouldn’t he? If City Hall won’t pay attention, stakeholders like him (and us) can only rant into the ether. It is all we can do when city staffers turn deaf ears. Responsiveness grade: F.

We know all about it, Scott. For two years we’ve been trying to get a few $200 bike racks out of our Transportation division, but we’ve had no luck. All over town, bikes are still lashed to meter poles. (Where’s the love for southside residents anyway?)

We suggest that you take your problem to the Traffic & Parking Commission, which meets on the 1st Thursday of every month. Permit issues are their stock-in-trade, and there you can address face-to-face the Transportation officials that are making your life miserable. Now, they don’t do much for us, but it beats braying on Facebook.

We point out the Commission because you might not know: that information is buried deep within our city’s website. Wait for the refresh, Scott, some day.

Residents should know that we sink probably a million bucks every year into salaries and benefits for staffers and contractors, yet we seem to fail to live up to our promise to be that “leading edge, innovative community in its government, business, and technology programs” as described in the city’s vision statement.

But in our view, the city is sometimes hobbled by questionable competence in department staffing and certainly undermined by an unquestionable lack of enthusiasm for engaging with the stakeholders. It shows on the website, on the Facebook page, and everywhere our city has tried to be the ‘smart city.’

Epilogue

You may be interested to know, Scott, where your $260 parking permit money goes. Your hard-earned dollars get sucked into a giant Parking Operations black hole to the tune of five million bucks per year. That is a funding deficit incurred just so that we can build and maintain public parking garages. There, of course, parking is provided free to city visitors. Not only do shoppers who park on your block park free while you pay, as you note, but people all across the city get the freebie too, also at your expense because you subsidize it with your permit fee.

To put that in perspective, your personal annual contribution to the city’s Parking Operations fund would have to be supplemented with that of twenty thousand other permit payers. That’s how big is the Parking Ops budget hole. Instead of paying up, we’ve chosen to ride a bike everywhere we go. It’s more economical and more fun and less burdened by the parking policies that so excited the ire of Scott Huff.

(Full disclosure here: we at Better Bike don’t know Scott Huff. For all we know he’s a deranged guy with a big chip on his shoulder. But he sounds pretty sane to us. Good work, Scott!)