I like to think that I’m a very stubborn demanding citizen¹: if a service exists where I can ask for more, from requesting trees to improving an e-book’s performance, I’ll do it. It works plenty of times, maybe not at the speed or quality I wanted, but on several occasions it wouldn’t have happened anyway had I not done it, so I keep doing it.

Belo Horizonte has a fairly complete online service system for its citizen’s demands and in using it extensively, I got used to some of its acronyms and replies. Due to this, earlier this year I noticed that all my tree requests started to get replies from a different department:

The handling of the requests stopped going to the “Regional Maintenance Management” to be taken by the “Urban Tree Quality Monitoring Department” which sounds considerably better suited. Being a bit sceptical, though, I wanted to understand whether this was just renaming or if it meant more personnel and a closer attention to the city’s environment, so I decided to ask the city council.

According to TSE², a city council member is:

The connection between the government and the population. They have the power to listen to what the voters want […]

It is a very broad definition, yet it contains what I needed, which is that they should listen to us, so I went to WhatsApp and messaged the one I had elected to ask what this change meant³. Their team directed me to send the request to the councilor’s official e-mail and so I did. Disappointingly, two months went by and I never got any response.

Belo Horizonte has 41 such councilors, thus I decided to mail the same request to all of them hoping that someone would get back to me. The first response came only 6 days later!

We acknowledge receiving your e-mail and forwarded your request to the team.

Great, someone is out there, but that someone never replied back 😂. A week later I got replies from two others:

This is not a responsibility of the city council, please reach out to the city hall.

Hmm, not very helpful, huh? Let’s see what the other said:

There was a recent change in the Town Hall where the department responsible for managing the trees of the city changed. I want to clarify that the city council does not partake in such decisions.

A bit more informative, though the information I got is what I already had. My mail asked what we should expect from this change and if it was positive and no one seemed to answer that yet. Another 10 days went by bringing the fourth response:

While reaching out to the city hall, we were told this change won’t alter the services, it’s just a contract management thing.

Ok, I guess nothing changes then, just the naming? This was the last response I got, in a month’s wait⁴. Only 10% of the councilors ever replied, with the responses being all over and some not being of any help.

The election is coming up in a week and though it won’t cover municipal roles, several of them are seeking to be congressman and congresswoman. Perhaps reaching out is one way of finding who will at least try and represent you, or maybe I’m just being delusional, but for sure if more people pried into their work there would be more pressure in achieving their goals 🤞🏼.