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Q&A
Discussion on Housing Connect outages and advance notice
0:41:15
·
125 sec
Council Member Sanchez raises concerns about Housing Connect outages and their impact on scheduled appointments for application assistance. She requests a commitment to provide advance notice for planned outages. Acting Commissioner Tigani responds with the agency's approach to outage notifications and potential workarounds.
- Sanchez highlights the long wait times for application assistance appointments and the potential harm of unexpected outages
- Tigani commits to providing advance notice for planned outages when possible
- The discussion touches on the challenges of unexpected outages due to external factors and the need for potential workarounds for in-person interactions
Pierina Ana Sanchez
0:41:15
Thank you.
0:41:16
Thank you, commissioner.
0:41:18
So and and one more follow-up on the on the notice the the question of notice around outages.
0:41:30
So in my office, I just asked my team, what is the waiting list?
0:41:34
So right now, if, you know, someone walks into my office and they say, wanna apply for an affordable apartment, and we wanna refer them to West Bronx Housing or KCC or Kings Ridge Heights Community Center or Arriva or UNHP, we're giving them appointments in July.
0:41:52
And so if on July 13, there is an outage, it's it's a it's really harmful.
0:41:56
So can you commit to not having the site go out without, say, a business day's notice or two business days notice so that we can flag for our partners and troubleshoot?
Ahmed Tigani
0:42:10
Two things.
0:42:11
One, I'd like to talk a little bit about how the waiting list is formed because and what that is versus the mini lottery which has come up, and I'll let Emily talk about that.
0:42:19
But in terms of notice, sometimes, usually if it's a planned outage, yes, we can commit to creating a timeline that makes sense.
0:42:27
The example I gave before about a new technology that was from the private side working within our system and creating issues was something that was developing in the moment and created a problem that we had to shut down.
0:42:42
So if it's something external affecting our system, it would be very hard to give advance notice, obviously.
0:42:48
But if we have a planned outage, we can work on giving as much time as possible.
0:42:54
It may be there's an emergency, we have to shut down, or we know that there is an update we wanna make, we're gonna give a nice long timeline.
0:43:02
We also can talk more and think more about the appointment piece because if there if there's an in person interaction that relies on the system information, maybe there's another workaround because as you pointed out, getting those appointments are very hard to schedule.
0:43:17
So that should be on our list to continue to work through.