OAK PARK -- What Ameritech and Oak Park have is a failure to communicate.
   The phones were out in the Oak Park Department of Public Works last week. Again. The department, plagued by phone problems for more than a year, had been operating without phones, faxes or modems until Friday while repair crews came and went.
   City officials are furious, but that's nothing compared to residents' reactions when nobody answers their inquiries.
   "If they can't reach us by phone and there's a major problem, they'll come in personally. They're pretty upset by that point, and I can't blame them," said Public Works Director Mike Chickonoski.
   This past year, Ameritech has been under the gun in Michigan and other states for service problems. At the peak of outrage, last August, the state Public Service Commission fielded more than 2,000 customer complaints.
   Since then, the number of gripes has declined and repair times have plummeted, prompting the company last week to claim its service troubles of last year are behind it.
   "We realized we needed to make a concentrated effort to improve our service, and we have over the past year," spokeswoman Denise Koenig said Saturday from Chicago.
   She voiced regret for "the inconvenience in Oak Park," adding: "We tried to resolve it as quickly as possible."
   The Public Works office had some of its phones back by Friday, but the city wasn't about to let Ameritech off the hook.
   After his calls, faxes and e-mails to Ameritech supervisors went unanswered, City Manager Daniel Fitzpatrick fired off an irate letter late last week. He berated the company for "poor to nonexistent service," meticulously listing each incident: the time the phones went out for a week; the other time the phones went out for a week; the time Ameritech lost a shipment of equipment ordered to replace equipment that had crashed the department's computer network; the time the phones in the city garage began arbitrarily hanging up on people in mid-call; all the times repair crews came out, then left, insisting the difficulty wasn't with Ameritech equipment.
   "We're paying them, I think, $20,000 a year and the quality of service we're getting is nonexistent," Chickonoski said.
   For her part, utility representative Koenig suggested that Fitzpatrick was grandstanding by faxing his complaint to reporters before the mailed original reached Ameritech. "We never received the letter," she said. "We were upset that they didn't contact us first."
   Up to two repair technicians had worked on the Public Works phones each day last week, Koenig said. "We're attempting to work with the city."

The Detroit News

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