Social Justice

If you have a complaint about a district service, it is currently reviewed by the department that provided it. Everyone involved understands the problem with that arrangement, and nobody has changed it, because the change costs money and produces uncomfortable reports.

What an independent office looks like

• It reports to full council, not to a director.
• It publishes an annual report naming the services complained about and the outcomes, without naming complainants.
• It has the power to require a response within twenty working days, and to record a non-response as a finding.

None of that is novel. Four of the six neighboring districts already have it. Rivermont does not, and the absence shows up in the one number we can compare: complaints upheld. The regional average is 31%. Ours is 9%.

The objection, and the answer

The standing objection is cost. An office of two full-time staff and a part-time chair costs about $190,000 a year, which is 0.2% of the district’s service budget.

The answer is that the district currently spends more than that on external legal advice arising from complaints that were mishandled early. An independent office is not an addition to that cost. It is a substitution for it.

What this movement does

It collects the cases. Every month, volunteers help residents write up complaints that have gone nowhere, and the anonymized set is published. Thirty of those did more to move this than five years of arguing in committee.