I was lucky to work for one of the most innovating cities in
the San Francisco Peninsula. Ed Everett the city manager of Redwood City was a
strong believer and practitioner of the “Reinventing Government” concept
articulated by David Osborne and Ted Gabler in their 1992 book, “Reinventing
Government”. This concept applies the
business customer service model to government. Citizens are seen as customers, and the government administrator's mission is to be responsive to their
customers and achieve a high level of customer satisfaction for the services
they provide to the community.
As a result, in Redwood City, all managers were evaluated
according to the level of customer satisfaction achieved by each one of the
services they managed. The City residents were given the
opportunity to evaluate the services at the time the services were provided, and by a customer service survey at the end of the year.
This simple but powerful concept of seeing residents as
customers and setting the governing body’s mission to achieve high levels of
customer satisfaction could easily be applied in our community. A good example of the need to implement this
concept is in our failing Shadows Restaurant, which had a financial loss in
2012 of $468,000 and as of the end of October 2013, the financial loss amounted
to $343,000.
The Shadows Restaurant is not only loosing money but also
the support of the Shadow Hills community, with many residents choosing to eat
somewhere else because of their dissatisfaction with the restaurant services.
PCM, the Shadow
Hills HOA management company gets paid $36,000 a year for managing the
restaurant and is failing to achieve a high level of customer satisfaction, as the recent on-line survey I recently initiated shows. You can see the results of the Shadows Restaurant by using this link:
The Shadows restaurant only achieves 21.9% customer satisfaction, which in Redwood City it would have serious consequences for the manager responsible for providing that service, including the loss of employment.
The HOA Board is not holding PCM accountable for the failing
restaurant and instead they rushed to renew PCM’s contract before the new HOA
Board is seated in March, 2014. The new
contract to manage the Shadows Restaurant is basically the same, PCM will
continue to be paid $36,000 a year, with the only difference that if the
financial losses continue, then, they will only get paid $18,000; but it fails to contain any customer satisfaction of financial stability goals or measures.
If elected to the Board, I will press for hiring a
professional Food & Beverage Service provider, that will be be accountable directly to the Board, and be responsible for
minimizing or eliminating the financial losses, and providing a high level of
customer satisfaction, like most other country clubs do.
