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Public Servants Now Plugged In 24-7

JULIE BUSCH / The Tampa Tribune

Tarpon Springs Mayor Beverley Billiris checks her calendar as she answers a call in the grocery dairy aisle.

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By GRETCHEN PARKER, The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 31, 2007

Slide Show: On The Job With Tarpon Springs' Mayor

It's a hot and hectic Friday night on the sidelines of Wharton High's homecoming.

The band dads are focused, ferrying giant kettle drums in time for their marching Wildcats to make the national anthem. It's a team sport on its own, getting the heavy equipment in place.

All the while, Santiago Corrada's BlackBerry is racking up e-mail.

As soon as he parks the drums, he checks it. Before cheering his daughter on the field, he checks it. In the two hours since he arrived here, he has received more than two dozen e-mails and five phone calls. It's all Tampa city business.

These days, the work of running government is a nonstop job. Thanks to the always-live tether of technology, old-school bureaucrats have gone the way of lead pencils and rotary dials. Some government managers now do it on weekends, in the evenings and later - long after lights are out at city hall.

Corrada, a highly visible member of the mayor's cabinet, oversees seven departments and is in charge of more city workers than anyone other than the police and fire chiefs. But he's a public servant; unlike a private businessman who works nonstop to woo clients, he doesn't make more money by working in his off hours.

Every night, before Corrada falls asleep, he tucks his BlackBerry into its charger on his nightstand. There are no new messages. It's midnight. When he wakes at 5:30 a.m., there is new e-mail.

'I'm like, what in the world? Who's e-mailing me now? Vampires?'

He's joking, of course. The truth is he's not surprised when he sees fresh messages before dawn. By the end of the day, he'll have 80 to 100 e-mails. It's everything from unkempt vacant lots to someone wanting to hold an event at the Tampa Theatre.

'There aren't any off hours,' he said. 'I hate to say it.' At dinner, if he finishes first, he checks it. Waiting in line at Disney World. Sitting in a movie, he checks it.

If he doesn't answer the after-hours e-mail when he gets it, he ends up drowning in digital quicksand later, he said. He never uses auto-reply when he goes on vacation, because the pile of e-mail waiting for him would be overwhelming.

It's not just his peers and staff who are trying to communicate late. Much of the e-mail he receives - especially overnight - is from residents. They are visiting the city of Tampa's Web site, www.tampagov .net, and asking for help. Not all are residents wanting potholes fixed and overgrown lots mowed. Some are visitors or tourists.

They either e-mail city staff, officials and managers like Santiago directly or they submit a general inquiry through the customer service center; the submissions to the service center alone have numbered 40,000 every year for the past three years.

Inquiries are delivered immediately to the staff who can answer the question. Sometimes the queries go straight to supervisors who run those departments.

Even at 3 a.m.?

'At 3 in the morning, it'll go to their e-mail inbox,' said James Buckner, who manages the staff that built and now runs the Web site. 'If they're carrying their PDA at 3 in the morning, they'll see it right then.'

Customer Service On The Web

Consider, too, how much money now passes through the city's Internet bill-paying service. This year, Tampa will collect $17.5 million over the Web - one dollar out of every 10 the city takes in. That's up from $10.6 million last year.

The California-based Center for Digital Government, along with the National League of Cities, tracks how much governments are using the Web for customer service. Of the cities that responded to the survey, 68 percent have Web sites that can accept complaints and requests. And 59 percent offer online bill paying.

The change has happened over the past five years, said Cathilea Robinett, executive director of the research center.

'Government is usually a little bit behind the private sector,' she said. But at the rate technology is changing, even bureaucracies have been rallied into action.

This year, the center ranked Tampa's site the best local government site in the country for being helpful and easy to use.

For some big wheels leading government, the nonstop engine isn't fueled by the Web site. Tarpon Springs Mayor Beverley Billiris hands out business cards with her cell phone number and e-mail address.

Being the top official of this historic town of 25,000 is a part-time job, but she keeps her laptop fired up at all hours, so she can respond at the same time she is caring for her ailing mother, running a couple of tourism businesses she owns and doing the books for her husband's international sponge businesses.

Residents, along with her staff and department heads, call her all the time. 'There are days when my cell phone rings every five minutes, and my house phone and my office phone,' she said. Another phone rang at her side as she spoke.

The Machine Feeds Itself

Usually, government leaders say, the calls overnight are emergencies. Storm flooding, a police shooting, a water main break. But not always. Sometimes it's a resident wanting a response to a problem in their neighborhood. Now. Still, staff and supervisors know calls from residents are a priority and they should aim to return them within 24 hours.

And it's a machine that feeds itself, said several who have grown used to answering late-night e-mail and taking calls during dinner and their childrens' soccer games and at red lights.

'We do it to ourselves,' said Billiris, who walks her dog and shops for groceries with her BlackBerry.

The more correspondence they answer - the more calls they take - the more they get. The people they work with and the people they serve get used to leaders being on call.

'Technology has raised people's expectations,' said Edith Stewart, a public affairs officer for Hillsborough County who also lobbies for the county in Tallahassee. 'Anyone who sends an e-mail believes that you immediately read it, and therefore, why don't they have the answer already?'

Many of Stewart's messages are residents' requests that are filed through the county Web site's Citizen Action Center. The center gets about 25,000 e-mail requests a year.

The tasks she gets filter down, too. She admits she sends her staff e-mail at midnight with work for them to do. She wants them to see her message first thing in the morning.

Stewart feeds the machine as well when she works late hours via the Internet.

'People hate me, because I answer e-mail at midnight. They say, 'turn that thing off,'' she said of her staff.

Better Government?

Whether or not all this cyber activity is making government run better is difficult to gauge.

Robinett thinks government Web sites are making those bureaucracies more transparent by letting residents reach their public servants directly. That also makes them and their staff more accountable, she said.

Tampa and Hillsborough County's Web sites track their service requests, sending e-mail to residents every time there is some action, so that they know the progress being made to resolve their problem.

It works best, of course, on problems that are less complicated - the ones that don't cross jurisdictional lines or require extensive research from staff, several government managers said. If you have a sticky issue that is difficult to untangle, a government Web site is only going to make the first few steps easier to manage.

But if you have a pothole or want to complain about an overgrown lot, being able to e-mail your local leaders makes government run more efficiently, said Buckner. Instead of waiting for a city worker to notice a problem, it's tagged immediately.

Doing business remotely, at late hours, also allows managers to talk to each other - and to keep tabs on whether they're getting tasks done, Corrada said. E-mail correspondence is like a trail that can't be covered over. He saves his, so he can refer to it later.

The downside, he said, is when he checks a late e-mail that is upsetting. Then he can't sleep.

Neighborhood group leaders said being able to e-mail their government contacts over the weekend is crucial. Even if they don't get their problem solved right away, they are able to get in the waiting line for that manager's attention, said Sherry Genovar-Simons, who runs the Southeast Seminole Heights Civic Association as a volunteer.

'It gets my name in the hat. It gets something in motion,' she said. Some problems, though, are addressed immediately - especially by code enforcement, she said.

Not all government managers, of course, are sleeping with their BlackBerries. Some don't return calls for days, said Fran Costantino, head of the East Ybor Historic and Civic Association.

Others, like Corrada, respond immediately.

'He will text me,' she said, 'on a Sunday. In the middle of a Bucs game.'

Reporter Gretchen Parker can be reached at gparker@tampatrib.com or (813) 259-7562.

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