Customer Bill of Rights: City of Seattle

Customer Bill of Rights: City of Seattle
Originally uploaded by rllayman

Seattle does a bunch of things that DC doesn't do. One is that it has created "neighborhood service centers" located within neighborhoods, where residents can pay parking tickets, appeal a parking ticket (magistrates rotate through the various neighborhood service centers on particular days), pay utility bills (electric, gas, and water service is provided by a publicly owned utility), deal with the neighborhood planner and other government staff people, pick up information on city programs, etc.

The City of Seattle has just finished a massive re-do of most of the city's libraries (see "Seattle Public Library celebrates "Libraries For All" in neighborhoods across the city" from the Seattle Times), and many of the libraries have a neighborhood service center integrated into the project, although the latter has a separate entrance and isn't connected to the library internally, at least in the Ballard Library-NSC.

While I don't like the idea of citizens being treated strictly as "customers" because ultimately the citizens own the processes of government, I do like the point that when a person has "to do business with the City of Seattle" that there are high quality expectations about the city's side of the "transaction."

Neighborhood Service Center, Ballard, Seattle. (The library is on the other side of the building.)