Me: What was your role in coordination - as the stand-in for the mayor?

or as a
representative of a community? or something else?
Meghan: All of the above. As a coordinator, I was something of a conduit betwee
n the mayor and the community. I was expected to know what the word on the stre
et was in terms of how citizens in my neighborhood felt about city government an
d the mayor in particular. I'd attend neighborhood meetings (civic association
meetings, crime watch meetings, abutters meetings for zoning projects) on an alm
ost nightly basis, hold office hours (I hope nobody's out there trying to find m
e still!), take phone calls and emails from people who had problems with city go
vernment that needed solving.
When I attended meetings, I was supposed to field questions from residents and p
ut down any uprisings against the city(!), defending the Mayor's positions and p
olicies as necessary.
I would say that I spent a lot of time coordinating cross-departmental basic cit
y services issues, analyzing current zoning matters to help the mayor make infor
med recommendations to the ZBA and BRA, and doing political work. The political
stuff involved targeting neighborhood events to get on the mayor's schedule and
making sure that when the Mayor was out in my part of the city that he had all
of the information he could possibly need to interact with residents.
Me: When you're not meeting with the public, are you mostly in City Hall? How di
d you divide your time? And where did your information come from - people? organ
izations? observations?
Meghan: Yes, when I was not in the district, I was in City Hall hunting the bure
aucrats down to solve the issues that had been brought up in the neighborhood.
I worked 60 hour weeks, so I'd say I spent 60% of my time in the office and 40%
of my time in the neighborhood. Most of my information came from people. They
called me or emailed me, and sometimes I ran into them on the street. I also us
ed to like having coffee fairly regularly with folks who were the president of t
heir neighborhood associations (there are 15 neighborhood groups in the South En
d). I also made observations about the neighborhood and tried to get city depar
tments to fix things like broken streetlights and park benches before residents
had the opportunity to call in and complain about them. That was really hard to
do because I was so busy chasing other cases that residents had already called
me about.
Me: In general, I guess, what does ONS do, and what do you think it could do bet
ter?
Meghan: ONS is the Mayor's eyes and ears in the neighborhood (I think that is ho
w the department's mandate is even phrased on the city website), the coordiantor
s are supposed to be the Mayor's surrogate when he is not around, and they're su
pposed to help constituents get results from city government. I think that ONS
has made an effort recently to use more data to drive decision-making and to foc
us a little more on the medium and long term than just addressing immediate need
s, and I think the department really needs to continue to use hard data to under
stand what is happening in the district.