Archive for city
Baltimore files new complaint against Wells Fargo
Posted by: | CommentsLawyers for the city of Baltimore have prepared a new complaint in their lawsuit against Wells Fargo, which contends that the bank steered black borrowers into subprime loans, then foreclosed on hundreds of city houses, leading to blight and higher public safety costs.
The city suffered a setback in January when U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz dismissed the suit. Motz said the connection between the Wells Fargo foreclosures and urban problems was “implausible when considered against the background of other factors leading to the deterioration of the inner city,” and called the suit overly broad.
City Solicitor George Nilson said Wednesday that the new complaint, which was filed Wednesday, outlines specific property damages – including millions in costs to city fire and police services – to more than 200 vacant, foreclosed properties spread out over 36 city blocks.
The new complaint also separates damages incurred by the city in the form of lost property taxes, Nilson said. When the foreclosed homes became vacant, the city alleges, many of them lost much of their value and drove down the value of nearby homes, leading to lost property tax revenue for the city.
City gets a kick to do better with complaints systemPaul Moloney
Posted by: | CommentsAt the urging of its new ombudsman, the City of Toronto plans to do a better job of telling citizens how to complain about problems they encounter with the city’s 50,000-person-strong bureaucracy.
In one of her first moves, ombudsman Fiona Crean asked all civic departments to forward copies of their processes for handling complaints from the public.
That was last December. She’s still waiting.
“We received good procedures from some, mediocre from others and none from yet others,” Crean told reporters Thursday. “Less than half the areas submitted processes or posted them on their website. Openness and accessibility was a problem even for those who had good procedures.”
Citizens must first seek redress from the relevant civic department before approaching the ombudsman’s office, on Elizabeth St. near city hall, but people often say the municipal public service just isn’t responsive to them, she said.
“I can’t tell you how many people said, `I never heard back from the city.’”
“So we’ll take the steps that are necessary to make sure that people have a well-understood point of access to approach the city with concerns they might have about a service, or a time frame in which a service was delivered. It’s completely reasonable.”
In 2009, the office received 1,057 inquiries and complaints and processed and closed 958 of them, or just over 90 per cent, she said.
As it began operations, the ombudsman’s office first focused on individual complaints. In 2010, Crean wants to turn her attention to solving systemic problems.
The first order of business is ensuring the government develops procedures to handle complaints and publicizes them.
People have been able to pursue complaints by speaking to a supervisor or, if that doesn’t get results, speaking to the division’s general manager, he said.
“There always has been a way to make your concerns known. What we’re doing now is formalizing that, making sure it’s documented and available publicly on websites and that the city communicates it more clearly.
“The goal, of course, is to deal with concerns people have as quickly as possible without the need to make a formal complaint.”
Ideally, municipal services should be provided in a way that doesn’t attract complaints, he added.
Retailers hoping for a bright new year
Posted by: | CommentsRecession-wracked city retailers say they were holding their own over the holiday shopping season while hoping to cash in on a happier 2010.
Traffic through electronics purveyor Soundsaround was strong but it was harder to make a buck, said Tony Scaffeo, the chain’s vice-president.
“Sales-wise, it’s been unbelievable — the only complaint is, we’re not making any money because the customers are getting such good deals,” said Scaffeo.
Holiday season 2009 will become known as the year of the television, he said, with the 32-in. model proving king among all the flat-screened bargains.
But he said the recession, teamed with price erosion and product saturation, weighed heavily on profits.
“It was the perfect storm — I’m glad 2009 is over and we’re looking forward to 2010,” said Scaffeo, adding customers conformed to retailers’ advice to wait until Boxing Week.
One of the city’s biggest shopping centres — Market Mall — reported Boxing Day traffic by 5% compared to 2008, though Christmas Eve was 7.7% better.
The prime shopping week beginning Dec. 14 was down by 1.3% at the northwest mall versus the previous year.
Retailers say an increase in Internet shopping has reduced foot traffic.
At Southcentre Mall, final sales numbers weren’t available, but spokeswoman Krista Moroz said shopping crowds were reasonably robust.
“On Boxing Day, we did over 35,000 people,” she said.
Crowds compared well with those of 2008, when the recession was just beginning to bite in the city, said Moroz.
“It seems people are still out shopping — hopefully it bodes well for 2010,” she said.
Rights group faults Mexico over alleged army abuse
Posted by: | CommentsReporting from Mexico City – The Mexican army, deployed across the nation as part of the government’s campaign against drug cartels, has killed prisoners, tortured civilians and captured suspects illegally, Amnesty International said Tuesday.
In a scathing report, the human rights organization was especially critical of Mexico’s civilian authorities, saying they had failed or refused to investigate or prosecute military abuses. Complaints against the military are almost entirely handled by military courts, and only a handful of cases, among thousands of denouncements, has been prosecuted.
“The abuses we have seen contribute to the deterioration of the security situation in Mexico,” Kerrie Howard, deputy director of Amnesty’s Americas Program, said in a statement. “By failing to take action to prevent and punish serious human rights violations the Mexican government could be seen to be complicit in these crimes.”
Cases cited included that of Saul Becerra, whose body was found near the violent border city of Ciudad Juarez in March. He was last seen being taken away by army troops several months earlier. Five men detained with him reported being held in the barracks of a motorized cavalry regiment and beaten and threatened for days.
In another case, 25 municipal police agents from Tijuana said they were seized by the army and held and tortured inside an infantry base for more than a month. Electrical shocks were applied to their feet and genitals, their heads were covered with plastic bags and they were beaten, they said, in an effort to exact false confessions.
In most of the cases, efforts by frantic families to find their missing relatives faced general inaction on the part of authorities, Amnesty International said.
Three men picked up by the army after dinner one night in March in the northern city of Nuevo Laredo were found burned to death about a month later. The families obtained photos and video of soldiers driving around in one of the dead men’s cars.
In this case, a rarity, 12 soldiers were arrested by the army, but, Amnesty International said, because of the military’s opaque justice system, it has not been possible to find out more about what happened and whether the soldiers were punished.
As drug violence and the pace of killings have soared exponentially — more than 14,000 people have died in drug-related slayings in the last three years — so has the number of complaints filed against the army with the National Human Rights Commission: 182 in 2006 compared with 1,230 in 2008 and almost 2,000 this year.
The highest number of human rights complaints has been registered in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s deadliest city, triple this year over last, officials say. Thousands of residents of Juarez took to the streets over the weekend in a march demanding protection from both traffickers and the army. It was a rare show of united public protest against the violence engulfing the region.
Calgary hit with snow-complaint avalanche
Posted by: | CommentsCars were stuck in snow-packed roads and many people still couldn’t get out of their neighbourhoods Monday–leading to more than 1,100 complaints coming in to 311 over the weekend –but city staff and politicians said crews are doing a good job cleaning up after the weekend storm.
With major roads scraped down to the pavement and equipment being sent to clear impassable residential streets, Dean Bell, the city’s manager of road maintenance, said they are on top of the situation.
“I understand people’s frustration when they can’t get to work or are sliding down a hill,” he said. “I think we’re doing a pretty good job, considering the money we get.
“Every storm’s different.”
He expected those streets so clogged by snow or frozen-in vehicles that residents can’t get in or out would be cleared by this morning’s rush hour.
“Our number one focus right now is to get all those impassable residential roads cleared up,” he said, adding there were about 40 locations that were impassable.
But while the city threw every available plow and person at the storm that dropped up to 20 centimetres on parts of the city and saw high winds blow snow into even higher drifts, residents were scrambling to extricate themselves from snowed-under neighbourhoods.
Oliver Ennis said there were still a bus and five cars stuck in the road in front of his Saddle Ridge home Monday. And Grant Galpin, another Saddle Ridge resident, said the hard-hit area was a “nightmare” over the weekend.
“People couldn’t go 10 feet without getting stuck,” he said. “If there had been an emergency case, it’s endangering lives.”
Ald. Ray Jones says while city crews did a great job at attacking the storm and doing what they could, council needs to ensure they are able to do more.
He’d like to see money pulled from the reserve fund in unusual storms such as the one that hit Friday.
“People were not very happy and understandably so,” he said.
With its annual budget of about $24 million, it clears roads with lanes totallingabout 8,000kilometres. The city has more than 14,000 lane kilometres of roads.
By comparison,Winnipeg’s snow clearing budget is $25 million this year, includingwhat it pays to retain outside contractors to call in during a storm. With that money it clears all its streets, including residential, a total of almost 3,300 lane kilometres. That is a distance shorter than Calgary’s priority one roads.
Calgary spends $23 per capita on winter maintenancecosts, compared to $62 in Edmonton, $44 in Winnipeg and $25 in Saskatoon.
It’s super expensive and it’s super expensive for the amount of man hours that it takes,” he said. “It’s a ton of money to put up snow fencing and a lot of times it’s not either effective or itwasn’t required anyway.”
Adviser says Memphis shelter ignored complaints
Posted by: | CommentsA member of the Memphis Animal Shelter advisory board says shelter officials failed to heed complaints about animals being starved and suffering from disease.
Cindy Marx-Sanders told The Commercial Appeal she complained for more than a year to shelter administrator Ernie Alexander and his director about conditions at the city-owned shelter, but nothing was done.
The newspaper reported volunteers and other citizens have called and written to City Hall for years about poor conditions at the shelter.
The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office executed a search warrant Tuesday morning and volunteers are caring for the animals. The warrant stated some animals had to be euthanized because of their poor condition.
Sexual Explotaitation of minors by foreigners
Posted by: | CommentsCartagena’s history as a Spanish bastion against English invasion, its cobblestone streets, quaint plazas, colonial churches, art museums and seafood restaurants attract many visitors. Yet behind the thick, ancient walls lurks a darker attraction: the sexual exploitation of minors by foreigners.
The city has become a magnet for men, many of them Europeans, seeking sex with young girls and sometimes boys, many of them from families displaced from their rural homes by fighting among leftist rebels, government forces and right-wing paramilitary groups.
On the main hotel strip, foreigners openly haggle with underage girls selling their bodies or duck past pink neon lights into what purports to be a discotheque. Inside, bored-looking teenage girls at tables perk up only when a man walks by. He can take his pick, pay as little as $15 and take her to a room across the road.
Vallenato rhythms, white sand beaches and its prostitutes, a third ofwhom are children.
Cartagena is a tourist resort on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. It’s famed for its old walled city, romantic
Vallenato rhythms, white sand beaches and its prostitutes, a third ofwhom are children.
“You can have anything you want in Cartagena – even our kids,” says Kelly Rodriguez from the Cartagena
office of Fundacion Renacer (Reborn Foundation), a child rescue centre partially funded by Ottawa.
She.has spent much of tonight trying to talk to a dozen kids juiced out of their minds on bazuco. Crack
came from the streets of Colombia. Bazuco is slang for bazooka, and these kids can hardly stand up,
incoherent, pupils the size ofdoorknobs.
Doesn’t matter. They’re still working – just as kids are working tonight allover Latin America.
“Third World countries are turning a blind eye to child sex tourism in order not to deter tourism,” says
Toronto Liberal Senator Landon Pearson, who campaigns at home against Canadian sex travellers.
“A crude way of looking at it is that these countries are exploiting their own children to payofftheir debt.
But, of course, no one would admit to that.
“But,” she adds, “it is also the demand that First World countries are imposing on Third World countries for
this type of trade.”
In Cartagena, the two youths from the hotel, Jose and Eduardo, both 19, are back within minutes.
Over the next few hours on this sticky night, they act as guides into the sick world of the tourist sex trade.
And, as kids are interviewed over the course of the evening, almost all say they’ve had experiences with
Canadians.
PPI complaint cases to be reopened
Posted by: | CommentsThousands of consumers who had complaints about single premium payment protection insurance (PPI) turned down could be in line for compensation after the City watchdog told lenders they must reassess their cases.
Rules introduced by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) mean lenders must revisit about 185,000 cases of consumers who have unsuccessfully complained about cover bought alongside unsecured loans since 1 July 2007, and compensate any they find have been mis-sold policies. If the review reveals widespread problems they could be forced to reopen cases going back to 2005 when the FSA took on the regulation of general insurance.
Single premium PPI, which is designed to cover loan repayments if a borrower falls ill or is made unemployed, was heavily criticised by the Competition Commission which said consumers were paying over the odds for policies they were often unable to claim on. The policies are sold at the same time as loans and often add to the overall balance, which means they attract interest. They also tend to be very costly to cancel.
The watchdog said firms had been acting in a “wholesale” manner – rejecting complaints and waiting for consumers to take them to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) before offering payouts – when they should have been looking at cases on an individual basis.
On average the firms have rejected around 60% of the PPI complaints they have received, although some have rejected nearly 100%. Of the 16% of complaints which go on to the FOS, around one in 10 result in the consumer’s favour. This is against an average of 50% across all financial products.
The FSA’s managing director of retail markets, Jon Pain, said: “The outcome of a complaint about a PPI sale should not depend on whether or not the complainant persists past the firm on to the FOS.
“This is the last chance for the industry to show that it can act fairly, consistently and in the best interest of consumers on PPI. All firms operating in this sector should take note and where necessary get their house in order. Where we find questionable practices in sales or complaint handling, firms can expect that we will take action.”
The Financial Services Consumer Panel welcomed the move but said the FSA needed to do more to help PPI customers. The group’s chairman, Adam Phillips, said: “This action has taken a long time, and the FSA still needs to tackle PPI sold with credit cards, secured loans and mortgages where people may not have complained.
“We also still await FSA enforcement action against individuals in some of the bigger players who were responsible for the mis-selling of PPI.”
The consumer group Which? said it hoped lenders would not attempt to exploit the rules to get out of paying adequate compensation. It added that complaints from consumers that had resulted in small pay outs should also be reviewed.
Making People Poor at Walmart
Posted by: | CommentsAt the world’s largest and most profitable retailer, low wages, unpaid overtime, and union busting are a way of life. Now Wal-Mart workers are fighting back.
* In 2001, sales associates, the most common job in Wal-Mart, earned on average $8.23 an hour for annual wages of $13,861. The 2001 poverty line for a family of three was $14,630. ["Is Wal-Mart Too Powerful?", Business Week, 10/6/03, US Dept of Health and Human Services 2001 Poverty Guidelines, 2001]
* A 2003 wage analysis reported that cashiers, the second most common job, earn approximately $7.92 per hour and work 29 hours a week. This brings in annual wages of only $11,948. ["Statistical Analysis of Gender Patterns in Wal-Mart's Workforce", Dr. Richard Drogin 2003]
Complaints about understaffing and low pay are not uncommon among retail workers — but Wal-Mart is no mere peddler of saucepans and boom boxes. The company is the world’s largest retailer, with $220 billion in sales, and the nation’s largest private employer, with 3,372 stores and more than 1 million hourly workers. Its annual revenues account for 2 percent of America’s entire domestic product. Even as the economy has slowed, the company has continued to metastasize.
Given its staggering size and rapid expansion, Wal-Mart increasingly sets the standard for wages and benefits throughout the U.S. economy. “Americans can’t live on a Wal-Mart paycheck,” says Greg Denier, communications director for the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW). “Yet it’s the dominant employer, and what they pay will be the future of working America.”
Wal-Mart has responded to the union drive by trying to stop workers from organizing — sometimes in violation of federal labor law. In 10 separate cases, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Wal-Mart repeatedly broke the law by interrogating workers, confiscating union literature, and firing union supporters. At the first sign of organizing in a store, Wal-Mart dispatches a team of union busters from its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, sometimes setting up surveillance cameras to monitor workers. “In my 35 years in labor relations, I’ve never seen a company that will go to the lengths that Wal-Mart goes to, to avoid a union,” says Martin Levitt, a management consultant who helped the company develop its anti-union tactics before writing a book called Confessions of a Union Buster. “They have zero tolerance.”
Wal-Mart’s success story was scripted by its founder, Sam Walton, whose genius was not so much for innovation as for picking which of his competitors’ innovations to copy in his own stores. In 1945, Walton bought a franchise variety store in Newport, Arkansas. The most successful retailers, he noticed, were chains like Sears and A&P, which distributed goods to stores most efficiently, lowered prices to generate a larger volume of sales, and in the process generated a lot of cash to finance further expansion. These, in turn, would serve as basic principles of Walton’s business. As he explains in his autobiography, Sam Walton, Made in America, he drove long distances to buy ladies’ panties at lower prices, recognizing that selling more pairs at four for a dollar would bring greater profits than selling fewer pairs at three for a dollar. The women of northeastern Arkansas were soon awash in underwear, and a discounter was born. Walton opened his first Wal-Mart Discount City in 1962 and gradually expanded out from his Arkansas base. By 1970 Wal-Mart owned 32 outlets; by 1980 there were 276; by 1990, 1,528 in 29 states.