Sunnyvale set to gauge service and satisfaction

Staff works on five programs to help address residents' needs

By Jana Seshadri

The Sunnyvale City Council and city staff would like to have a better handle on how the city's residents and customers perceive and receive their services. In order to achieve this goal, five programs in the Sunnyvale Community Development Department are being restructured to follow the "outcome management format"--community planning, development services, economic prosperity, neighborhood preservation and housing and human services.

According to Robert Paternoster, director of community development, the city is switching over to outcome management, which will be a better way for city council and staff to conduct reviews of the services and programs that residents and customers receive from the city. There are three components by which each program is restructured. The first is a program outcome statement, which describes the program's overall purpose. The second is a program outcome measure, which describes the most important results that the program should produce. Finally, there is the weighting for each outcome measure, which describes the relative importance of each outcomer.

"We want to know how the residents feel about the services they're receiving from the city," Paternoster said.

He added this can be accomplished from customer satisfaction surveys and outcomes from programs and services.

Out of the five programs being restructured to follow the outcome management format, the Neighborhood Preservation program received the most attention by speakers and city council members during the March 26 city council meeting.

Thom Mayer, a resident of the Lakewood Village neighborhood, requested that the city monitor neighborhood preservation and improvement closely, especially code enforcement and abatement. Mayer said he would also like to see the weightings for several survey items increase to raise their priority. He added he was concerned about code enforcement issues in neighborhoods, reflected in the city's Citizen Opinion Survey.

"Currently 80 percent of the respondents say that code enforcement issues are not a serious problem in their neighborhoods," Mayer said. "This number means that 20 percent of the respondents think that there is a serious problem about code enforcement, and that is high."

Mayer also pointed out that chronic code violations, which are resolved within 10 months, should be resolved within six months.

City council members directed staff to examine neighborhood preservation along geographic boundaries and return with a feasibility and budget report.

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