SCOUT Program Inspects City Streets
More than 40,000 conditions have been reported since October 2007. Queens accounts for about 28 percent of all conditions reported citywide, with most conditions reported within Community Board 13 and the fewest in Community Board 1.
BY RICHARD GENTILVISO

Last August, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the SCOUT program. The Street Condition Observation Unit Team (SCOUT) is a roving group of 15 members from various city agencies charged with inspecting every city street once a month for quality of life problems.

The idea is to get "more eyes on the street", Liz Weinstein, director of customer service for the mayor's Office of Operations, said.

SCOUT inspectors use their Blackberries to report graffiti, clogged sewers, potholes and damaged bus shelters to 311 with a GPS system that automatically identifies the exact location of the problem.

"SCOUT looks at streets the way a normal person does," Weinstein said during a presentation to a joint meeting of the Queens Borough Board and Cabinet on July 7.

The goal is to proactively report problems and to assure accountability in fixing them, Weinstein said.

More than 40,000 conditions have been reported since October 2007. Queens accounts for about 28 percent of all conditions reported citywide, with most conditions reported within Community Board 13 and the fewest in Community Board 1.

The top five conditions reported in Queens for the month of May 2008 were: 1. Defective street cut; 2. Pothole; 3. Sunken catch basin; 4. Defective street utility hardware; 5. Graffiti. SCOUT uses "borrowed" staff from other city agencies for six-month tours of duty to cover every street in the city, every month, traveling an average of 20 miles of street per day in scooters and sedans, five days a week, eight hours a day.

"People don't believe that we do it but we do," said Weinstein. This summer, SCOUT will begin to post conditions on the Web, she said.

Richard Italiano, district manager of Community Board 4, inquired about posting all 311 conditions. "It's a good question," replied Weinstein.

"I think every community board wants the statistics," said Marilyn Bitterman, Board 7 district manager. "I want to be able to see patterns," she said. "That's what we've been asking for since the inception of 311."

Community boards, also constituting "more eyes on the street" that serve their residents as the most local form of city customer service, recently dodged a budget crisis.

All 59 community boards in the city were supposed to get a $10,000 reduction in their minimal budgets, a 5 percent cut out of an average of about $200,000 for each board that would have totaled $590,000 out of the entire $59.2 billion city budget. The cuts were eliminated through negotiations between Bloomberg and the City Council.

Other than district managers and clerical staff, community boards are composed of unsalaried members.

Weinstein said she would be happy to advise district managers, per their request, to be notified when SCOUT was scheduled to be inside their community board districts.

"The problem is everything gets decided in Manhattan without any input from the boroughs," said Deputy Borough President Karen Koslowitz. "The people here [Borough Board and Cabinet] have a right to be informed."