More on HOPE and the HEC

You may recall the kerfuffle between the City of Houston and HOPE over the latter's radio ads concerning high school students answering 911 calls. The city had initially denied the claims made by HOPE and tried to quash the ads. LM Sixel picks up the story from there.

After months of negotiations over vacation time, grievance procedures and other matters, several sticking points remain unresolved. For instance, the city wants to reserve more than half of the money for merit increases -- like most private sector workers get -- while the union wants a much higher proportion distributed in across-the-board raises.

Some of the problems facing the city stem from not paying its employees enough money, said Jere Talley, a member of the negotiating team for HOPE. Low wages create turnover that puts additional pressure on remaining workers, she said.

"I want to stress the point that it's truly about quality public service and what's on the table now won't remedy that," said Talley, a city employee.

The union is hoping to gain traction through radio ads that claim high school student interns are answering 911 emergency calls.

City spokesman Frank Michel said high school students are not permitted to field emergency calls and he criticized the HOPE radio ads that featured a retired supervisor claiming that he supervised the students as they answered the phones. However Michel concedes that after the supervisor retired this summer, another supervisor improperly allowed four high school students to answer emergency calls, a practice since stopped.

"The ads just aren't true and I can only guess they're desperate and they're misleading people in an effort to put public pressure on the mayor and City Council to come to some agreement," said Michel. The mayor is working on his own radio ad to answer some of the union's criticisms.

So it turns out that the union was right about the use of high school kids, and the city got caught with its pants down. Isiah Carey hits on this as well.

It was Monday when David Cutler (pictured above), the director of HEC, maintained high school students never answered 911 emergency calls as part of a co-op program. This came after HOPE, the city workers union, ran radio ads making the claims. A former 911 center supervisor is heard in the commercial saying he supervised high school students who answered 911 calls. Those life or death type emergency calls. But Cutler in a video taped interview said it never happened. He said the union was misleading the public. Today, we find out Cutler was wrong. There were at least 4 teenagers - high school students - answering 911 emergency calls according to the Mayor's office. I asked spokesperson Joe Laud how could the head of HEC not know who's answering 911 calls. Laud didn't have an answer but told me they only learned of the student's actions after the tv interview with the Insite. The question I had for Laud is how could the director of HEC not know what was going on at the facility the Mayor entrusted him to oversee? Just a question the Insite would like answered...

Never a good time for a government agency when it gets the "how could you not have known about this?" question. But really, that's just a gotcha, and it's not the main point. The key is what Jere Talley said about low wages and high turnover. Speaking as someone who worked for years in the customer service business, you just can't be training new people all the time. It's inefficient, it puts a huge stress on your best people since they're picking up the slack for the newbies as well as answering their questions, and it leads to a high rate of error. That's a bad thing for a computer help desk, but it's quite a bit worse for an emergency call center.

One more thing, from the Sixel piece:

The challenge of public sector unions that deliver key services is not to alienate the public, said Mark Sherman, an arbitrator and mediator and associate professor of management at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. It's an automatic public relations problem if they stop collecting the garbage or responding to citizens' problems.

Those unions can't afford to lose popular support, he said.

"If you do, you just play in the hands of the (city)," said Sherman. "Then they can drop the boom on you -- and they can use public disenchantment as the reason."

Seems to me that public disenchantment works both ways. How many city officials do you think have ever been voted out of office for not getting the trash picked up on time? More than a few, I'd venture to guess. The city has the deeper pockets here - speaking of which, the Mayor's response ad is here (MP3) - and can probably win the PR battle if it needs to. But I don't see it as necessarily zero sum, and I don't think it's a sure thing for the city if it comes down to some kind of service disruption. The buck stops with the people in charge, after all.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on December 06, 2007 to Local politics