December 14, 2009
Dear Community Partner,
As you may already be aware, over the last year the Bureau of Development Services has experienced its most drastic workload and revenue decline in recent history due to a steep and sustained decline in construction activity. In response to the revenue and workload decline, the Bureau has laid off 150 employees over the last 5 months. Bureau management and staff have been implementing service level and organizational changes focused on maximizing our ability to provide customers an acceptable level of service despite reduced resources.
In order to keep our customers up to date with these changes, we have developed a communication plan to regularly communicate any significant bureau organizational and service level changes to our customers, industry stakeholders, community organizations and citizens. This communication plan includes summarizing changes into Service Level Update documents that are provided to affected customer groups. All of the Service Level Update documents are posted on the BDS web site at http://www.portlandonline.com/bds/index.cfm?c=51292. The Service Level Update PDF summarizes our communication plan.
Please let me know if you have any questions about this or our Service Level Update communication plan. I am also very interested in ideas you may have on getting this information out to our customers.
Thank you,
Ross Caron, Manager/PIO
Bureau of Development Services
City of Portland, Oregon
(503) 823-4268
ross.caron@ci.portland.or.us
www.portlandonline.com/bds