Have a Code Hassle? Hold the Phone . . .
Posted on: Thursday, 30 March 2006, 06:00 CST
By Charles Rabin, The Miami Herald
Mar. 30--An abandoned car on a city swale for months. Garbage piling up on a street corner or an unsafe building.
Normally these issues would be solved in Miami with a simple call to the city government's Neighborhood Enhancement Team office. But not in Coconut Grove.
Since Oct. 12, the phone in the Northeast Grove NET office on McFarlane Road has been out of service.
To get service, Grove residents have had to visit the office in person.
The phone suddenly began working again Wednesday afternoon -- after a series of e-mails and calls from The Miami Herald. Miami Information Technology worker Alba Weinman fixed the "fried phone," saying it wasn't a BellSouth issue.
But why it took so long to repair is still a mystery.
It's not as if no one was aware of the problem. NET worker Maraisa Vega e-mailed her director, Ricardo Gonzalez, the day the line went dead. On Jan. 26, she e-mailed Grove NET Director Homer Whittaker and now-citywide NET Director David Rosemond. Still, the phone lay dead.
Turns out the worker assigned to fix the phone retired and his replacement was never told about the dead phone.
On Feb. 13, a fed-up Whittaker sent another e-mail to Rosemond: "Please be advised that the phones are still basically inoperable and the residents continue to express their frustrations."
Last Friday, Whittaker resigned, in part, one insider said, because he was fed up with inaction -- like the Grove phone issue.
Rosemond couldn't pinpoint the problem on Wednesday: "I'm sure the impact of the hurricane had a lot to do with it. Not being someone who understands how the system works, I can't tell you what the issues were."
Hurricane Wilma hit South Florida on Oct. 24.
The NET office phone number is 305-579-6018.
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Copyright (c) 2006, The Miami Herald
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.
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Source: The Miami Herald
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