HE’S WORKING nearly 60-hour weeks, managing a workload that would give even the most proficient multi-tasker nightmares. People consistently yell at him while he’s on the job. And he’s saddled with a nearly impossible task.
Does he hate his job? Hardly. “I really love it,” he insists. “I’m a real lucky guy to be here.”
Meet Joshua Hathaway, the city’s code compliance department’s new – and possibly masochistic – community services coordinator.
Brought on board in late April, it’s now Hathaway’s job to improve the image of code compliance in Dallas and soothe the frayed nerves of fed-up residents.
He’s only been in Dallas since January 2003 – he moved here from Louisiana, where he got his law degree at Baton Rouge – but he’s already committed to helping his new home.
“My goal is to improve Dallas neighborhoods by communicating with the local citizens, educating them as to how the Department of Code Compliance can assist them, and forwarding their concerns to management and administration,” Hathaway says.
Does he mean it? It sure seems like it. He’s sent out hundreds of letters – 363, to be exact – to home and neighborhood associations all over the city, requesting that they call him with their concerns.
“I’ve had quite a response so far. A lot of people just called to yell at me,” says the remarkably good-natured Hathaway. “Which I’m used to already.”
And the groups he’s met with? “They yell at me a lot, too,” he says. “But if I listen to them, by time I walk out of there I’ve made some friends.”
Besides listening, his main task in dealing with residents is to “educate the public as to how to get their concerns addressed. It’s my favorite part of the job,” he adds.
The key, he says, is to build up confidence in the very system most people don’t believe in: the Citizen Request Management System, better known as 311, which was implemented in early 2002.
“A lot of people don’t know about 311 or don’t trust 311,” he says. “They’d rather find a number or call their council member and complain. But that doesn’t really get the job done.”
By calling 311, he says, residents “can get service request numbers and follow up on their request.
“311 is a nexus center where operators can get in touch with every department in the city of Dallas,” he adds. “Every action taken on a request is put into the 311 system, allowing residents to track it [and see how it’s progressing].”
In addition to meeting personally with residents, Hathaway is implementing other changes to improve the system. Most notably, he says, is a system introduced to deal with “escalating service requests.”
“When a service request is not resolved it escalates to the next highest person in the chain of command. For example, if a high weeds complaint received by 311 is not resolved at the code inspector level, it then escalates to the district manager, then the assistant director is notified, then the director, then assistant city manager, etc. This way if an inspector fails to resolve a problem his supervisor will be notified.
“We have someone in this office that checks this every day,” he says. “So now complaints can’t slip through the cracks like they have in the past.”
Hathaway knows he has a daunting task ahead of him.
“We seem to be painted in a bad image lately,” he says of his department. “People feel like when they call, they can’t get any help. And we do have to enforce, and a lot of people don’t like that. But I want to get across to them that we are trying very hard to improve our neighborhoods.
And, he says, of the city’s nearly 150 code inspectors: “They’re a lot of great guys that work hard and believe in what they’re doing.”
That, he adds, goes for just about everyone down at code compliance. “We’re listening, we’re trying, and we’re doing the best we can to answer their concerns,” he says.
