Cut The Red Tape At City Hall: SARAVANAMUTTOO

I’m a big believer in the need for strong governments — especially now.

However, I’m not willing to blindly defend how federal, provincial or local governments operate and whether they could run more efficiently.

One major cause of government inefficiency is the processes that have built up over time which administrations have simply failed to modernize.

Let me share one example.

Don’t try this at home!

How hard should it be to book a room at a local community centre?

Visit a website. Click on a form. Insert your credit card number. Maybe wait a few hours for official approval, so that the city can be sure they are not renting to a bad actor. That sounds reasonable.

Public Servants Get Political

But no. Here’s what I recently went through to book a community centre room for one evening.

• Visit the City of Ottawa website and find a contact email that manages bookings at that facility.
• Message the email and describe the booking I would like.
• Resend that message two days later when there is no reply. Receive an auto-responder that informs me to expect “a minimum of two weeks’ (10 business days) notice to accommodate rental requests”.
• Visit the community centre in person. Find out that the city only staffs the front desk a few days a week and that no one from the city is currently present.
• Send a third email, clarifying that this booking is time sensitive.
• Get a phone call from a helpful city booking clerk, who explains that they need to check with the local neighbourhood activity group to see if the room is free.
• Get a call back from the booking clerk the next day to say the room is free. The booking clerk kindly sets up an account for me, sends me a rental application, and a six-page document How to Make a Rental Payment Online.
• Fill out the rental application and send it to the booking clerk.
• Email the booking clerk a week later to ask if they received my rental application.
• Get a response the next day to inform me that, yes, my booking has been received and processed, but that the system will not input my request to add the liability insurance option to the room rental.
• Get notified a day later that the problem is fixed.
• Get tripped up paying my invoice (but which is on me for not having studied the six-page How to Make a Rental Payment Online in sufficient detail), which takes another call to fix.

Done. I now have my room rental confirmed. 18 days after I started.

It took a total of seven emails from me, three phone calls with city staff and one visit to the community centre.

We can do better

When it was created, this process probably seemed reasonable from an internal City of Ottawa perspective. But from the perspective of the customer, it is outdated and unnecessarily cumbersome.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how we could streamline this process. But will the city?

Neil Saravanamuttoo is a former G20 infrastructure chief economist, director of CitySHAPES and the author of The 613 on Substack.

Reprinted by permission

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