SAN ANTONIO – When the pests at a vacant house on Quintana Road became so bad that they began to invade her mother’s home next door, Mary Losleben had to pay more than $300 for rodent control.
The property, which Losleben said began falling into a state of disrepair in 2018 after the man living there moved out, has long been the subject of complaints to 311, the city’s customer service office.
From August 2020 to this April, the dilapidated home was reported to 311 at least a half dozen times, according to city data analyzed by the KSAT 12 Defenders.
While Losleben said a city code compliance officer was at first good about updating her on the status of the property, she claims the city has repeatedly closed her complaints without doing anything other than taping administrative paperwork to the front door and occasionally cutting the overgrown grass.
What’s most frustrating for Losleben is the city’s lack of updates in recent months, as her mother’s health faded.
Losleben’s mother eventually had to be moved from her bedroom to a front room, after rats began crawling on the fence outside her bedroom window.
She passed away this summer at the age of 97.
“Do you not have a deadline? Is there no deadline for this?” asked Losleben, during an interview with the Defenders this summer.
After the Defenders reached out about Losleben’s complaints and the status of the property, a spokeswoman for code compliance confirmed the city’s Building Standards Board ordered the home to be demolished in March 2020, after following state laws for due process and once officials had been repeatedly unable to contact the owner.
The demolition, however, has been held up due to a state declaration that has halted demolitions except in emergencies.
“I think that the word is sometimes ‘closed,’ does not mean ‘resolved.’ There are different reasons for closure and I think that that is something that we are definitely working on with the community to understand the nuances between the two,” said Paula Stallcup, director of 311.
While the city in recent years has increased the number of ways for residents to file customer service requests, including by email, an online portal or a downloadable app, a vast majority of inquiries are still made via telephone, according to Stallcup.
While 311 staff logs over a million interactions with the public on an annual basis, over 900,000 of them still include phone calls, Stallcup said.
While over half of the interactions are for information only, hundreds of thousands of others turn into service requests, which are then farmed out to the appropriate city department.
“They want to talk to somebody about the situation. They want to talk to someone to understand and really have that two-way dialog,” said Stallcup, pointing out that the city’s 311 call center is open 12 hours a day, seven days a week.
Andrew, a resident of Redland Estates who asked that we not use his last name, expressed frustrations similar to those of Losleben during an interview in the backyard of his far North Side home.
He was among of a group of residents to complain about an infestation of mosquitos in their neighborhood this summer, after a higher than normal amount of rain fell in the area.
Andrew said the mosquito issue was so severe, he planted vegetation in his backyard and hired a professional mosquito service to spray his property.
He said the vegetation was ineffective and he canceled the service after it did nothing to combat the problem.
“If it rains I got mosquitos so bad, they’re regenerating so fast, they’ll go right through the screen,” said Andrew, referring to his screened-in back porch.
After a resident questioned whether a row of businesses behind the neighborhood was contributing to the mosquito problem, a neighbor took pictures showing pools of standing water in jacuzzis being stored outside one of the businesses.
A spokeswoman for code enforcement said officials visited the business twice in June and were working with the owner to address the issue.
The general manager at the spa business, however, told the Defenders the breeding ground is actually a spillage pond located about a quarter-mile away.
Amidst the finger-pointing on who was responsible, Andrew said his complaint was closed, without the issue being corrected.
“I felt lied to. Yeah, because I was told the problem was changed or fixed,” said Andrew.
Stallcup said city staff is looking into how to quantify how often 311 requests are closed without a resolution taking place.
Parity among council districts
Unlike some other major cities, where customer service programs have been criticized for how they respond to complaints, San Antonio’s data shows significant consistency among its 10 city council districts.
All 10 districts have a closure rate of well over 80%, according to 311 data as of late August that covers the past 12 months.
“We don’t treat any call any differently,” said Stallcup.
Still, some calls fall through the cracks.
After a resident filed a complaint with 311 in June that several industrial barrels near a VIA bus stop at Ingram Rd. and Mabe Rd. were a possible safety hazard, the request was handed off to code enforcement.
It was not addressed for several weeks.
A spokeswoman for code enforcement blamed glitches in new software for why no one had taken on the barrel situation until after the Defenders reached out about it.
“The address for this item fell into an ‘unassigned’ area (basically, an area not covered by a specific field office) and frankly, we missed it. Since your call, we have dispatched an officer to the location and were able to verify that the tipped-over barrel was full of trash bags and cement at the bottom. The other 2 drums are sealed but do not have any hazmat markings or labels. We have contacted the property owner to inquire what is in the barrels. The next step will be to have them removed (either by owner or the city). We will keep you posted,” the spokeswoman said via email June 24.
In late September, however, nearly four months after the original 311 complaint was made, one of the barrels remained on the property in the same location near the bus stop.