City Halls Answer the Calls--Even Nasty Ones

They complain about speeding trucks, their kids not doing their homework, fireworks over Disneyland, cat lovers, parking tickets and, of course, potholes. When the hot Santa Ana winds blow, the calls can turn mean and nasty.

In Anaheim, one caller was so mad about his neighbor’s hedge that he began hyperventilating on the answering machine tape.

“We thought he was going to have a heart attack,” marveled Shirley Taylor, the city’s executive secretary and official tender of the Mayor’s Hotline.

Since 1978, three Orange County cities--Anaheim, Orange and Santa Ana--have set up mayors’ hot lines; a telephone just for complaints, if one can imagine the magnitude of the concept.

Urban Cries

Anaheim and Santa Ana have answering machines running around the clock, absorbing the urban cries of their half a million residents. Orange, with only 100,000 residents, actually has a live person picking up the phone during regular office hours. That practice was abandoned by the other two cities because, as Taylor said, “it was taking up too much staff time.”

Orange originally went with an answering machine in 1982, when then-Mayor Jim Beam thought he would start his own hot line. “But then people started complaining about the machine,” recalled Marilyn Jansen, city clerk. “They felt the hot line should be hot, not a recorded voice.”

Some complainers can never be satisfied.

“We have a lot of people who call thinking the mayor is sitting there,” Jansen sighed. “But that’s not possible, of course.”

Anaheim is generally credited with being the first city in the county with a mayor’s hot line. In September, 1978, incoming Mayor John Seymour (now a state senator) “was very interested in being responsive and communicating with his constituents,” said City Clerk Leonora Sohl(.

Seymour remains a hot-line legend in Anaheim. The man would often answer the telephone himself.

“He made an all-out effort, and we know why,” Sohl said, laughing. “He wanted to be elected to higher office. It worked. He was very popular.”

Perhaps it’s a sign of blander times, but mayors now don’t even bother to contribute their own voices to their hot lines.

Anaheim uses the velvet vocal cords of an anonymous “Mr. Anaheim” from the city manager’s office, Taylor said with a chuckle. “We had to put a new recording in there every time we got a new mayor, so we decided to heck with that.”

Not So Many

Not that there are really so many complaints. Anaheim and Santa Ana log about 80 a month. Orange, for unknown reasons, records twice that number.

To put the complaining in perspective, Beijing, China--which joined the hot-line bandwagon last September--averages around 400 calls a month to the mayor. And there are 10 million people there. New York City, not surprisingly, probably leads the world in this malcontent category with about 15,000 complainers a month.

On the second floor of the Anaheim City Hall, behind the locked door with the sign reading, “Authorized Personnel Only,” the amiable Taylor oversees the complaint process along with her other duties. She runs an operation tighter than a bank’s.

In the morning, a clerk types up the complaints left on the answering machine over the previous 24 hours. A copy of each call goes to the mayor and City Council and to the department handling the complainer’s problem.

Taylor files her yellow copy of each typed-up complaint and, in a stenographer’s note pad on her desk, makes a note of the call and what action was taken.

Every caller who leaves an address gets a letter in the mail acknowledging the complaint, and within five working days someone checks back to see if the problem has been corrected, Taylor said.

“Sometimes they’re not happy,” she said. “But most times we’re able to satisfy them. Even if they’re not happy, they are appreciative.”

And when it rains real hard, “it seems like we get more calls. With a real good storm going, that keeps people in, and what do they have to do but call the city?”

Santa Ana winds and full moons also bring out the callers.

“We do a lot of joking about full moons,” Taylor said. “But Santa Ana winds, they do make you real nervous sometimes. People get edgy.”

One advantage of the answering machine is that callers tend to be meeker and use less profanity than the occasional outraged citizens who drop by her office in person, Taylor said.

She keeps all sharp objects off her desk so they are not used on a city employee.

“People come to the counter and holler at us, you might say,” Taylor said. “ ‘I want to see the mayor right now!’ ”

In Santa Ana, which boasts the only bilingual hot line, one of the biggest flood of calls ever came when the City Council was considering a plan to limit the number of pets that residents could keep.

“We were getting 300 phone calls a day,” said Kristal Henning, a senior office assistant. Two neighbors were warring over cats at the time. One man kept scores in his home. His neighbor set cat traps. So the man planted a sign in his front yard reading: “You’re a Nazi cat killer.”

One caller complained that a neighbor’s dog was in the yard and in heat, Henning said.

Henning uses a sense of humor to handle the rude and obscene calls. “There was a heavy breather once, panting and everything,” she said. So Henning rewound the tape and “we had all the girls up here with popcorn.”

But, she said, “the majority of people do have legitimate complaints.”

And there is another side to hot lines that can be difficult to measure: having a number that people can call and feel like at least a voice--even if it is recorded--has heard them.

As Santa Ana City Clerk Janice Guy said: “Folks like to be reassured that there’s a person behind the bureaucracy.”