Public can put reviews of municipal staff online
If you’ve ever dealt with one of Miami’s public employees and have something to say about the experience — good or bad — you’re about to get a digital suggestion box to speak your piece.
A new startup called CityGrader has launched a website where anyone can leave reviews of municipal employees and departments online for the whole world to read. Think Yelp or TripAdvisor for Miami’s government. That includes cops, clerks, parks personnel, elected officials and entire city departments, such as code compliance and building.
The city of Miami is just one of 40,000 U.S. jurisdictions CityGrader has in its database, which will be rolling out through this year. Several Miami-Dade cities and their workforces are already listed on the site.
Paola Newell and her husband Tony, who have worked in construction for years, founded the company in Coral Gables after having a range of positive and negative encounters with building department employees. Working as general contractors, they were often pulling permits and meeting with inspectors.
They wanted to make sure that feedback got to supervisors, but it was hard to cut through the layers of bureaucracy to reach the right people.
“We’ve had some rather remarkable experiences, both positive and negative,” Tony Newell said. “I find it’s hard to do anything about those experiences, to give credit where credit is due and to give criticism where criticism is due.”
CityGrader started developing its platform last year. The company doesn’t need local government’s blessing because it’s using publicly available information — rosters of public employees. But Miami and Coral Gables have both passed resolutions supporting the venture.
No later than June, visitors at Miami City Hall on Dinner Key or the city’s downtown riverside administration building can stop at a kiosk to use a streamlined version of the CityGrader platform to leave feedback. Later in the summer, Coral Gables will get a similar setup.
“We believe in transparency in government and that extends to the work that we do as public servants,” said Miami spokesman Eugene Ramirez. “We look forward to providing our residents access to the platform in convenient locations so they can tell us how we’re doing.”
It probably behooves Miami to get on board with the concept. Whether City Hall officials like it or not, CityGrader will give anyone the ability to grade the city’s operations and personnel and post public comments.
As with any such service, trolls or even political operatives would be able to participate in the conversation. The website allows users to grade employees and departments with their user names or anonymously.