Since it was first established in 1993, the Environment Protection Reporting Center’s Public Nuisance Reporting Management System has been responsible for handling the public nuisance complaints that are submitted by members of the public throughout Taiwan via various different channels. Depending on the local government authority that has jurisdiction over the area in question, and the number of complaints received, the System notifies one of the 26 county- and city-level environmental protection agencies to respond to the complaint. During the first ten months of 2014, the System handled an average of just over 22,000 complaints per month; the System constitutes a vital tool for the various government agencies involved in handling public nuisance cases. The present project involves the maintenance of the System software environment, in order to ensure that System operations can be carried on normally, with room for further expansion; the project also involves adding 22 new functions to the system this year, in line with operational requirements and the general public’s needs, so as to make the system more convenient to use and enhance administrative performance. During the project implementation period, in order to achieve the building of consensus and effective policy implementation, the following activities have been carried out: 2 training sessions, 1 operations review meeting and 11 progress report presentations. In every case, these activities were supported by the provision of meeting presentations, lecture materials and handbooks, as well as lecture invitations, etc., so as to speed up the successful achievement of the project’s goals. In the current fiscal year, as part of the present project, statistics were compiled regarding the results of public nuisance complaint handling in FY2013 and FY2014, and these results were used in communication and the sharing of views with environmental protection authorities, to facilitate the formulation of strategies for enhancing the quality of complaint handling and overcoming obstacles to improved handling. In addition, project implementation in the current fiscal year has also focused on the following key areas, with the aim of providing a more user-friendly, more highly automated platform for on-site auditing and decision-making support: 1. To reduce the inefficient use of manpower and improve the efficiency with which cases are dealt with, it was decided that the Public Nuisance Reporting Management System would handle all public nuisance complaints received under the 1999 Assignment System, with complaint handling and the process of replying to the members of the public submitting the complaints being centralized under the Public Nuisance Reporting Management System. This has led to a significant reduction in unnecessary waste of effort caused by the creation of duplicate files. 2. In order to gain a clearer understanding of the quality of service provided by the personnel responsible for taking complaint calls at the Bureau of Environmental Inspection’s Northern, Central and Southern regional offices, and at the environmental problem reporting centers of the special municipalities of New Taipei City, Taichung City, Tainan City and Kaohsiung City, and 17 individual counties and cities, telephone call handling quality testing was performed. Telephone courtesy testing has already been completed for the period April – November, with a total of 896 calls being examined. 3. Ongoing follow-up has been performed with respect to repeated complaints, along with analysis of items where low satisfaction has been reported in public opinion surveys. A list of repeated complaint cases has been prepared and submitted to the Bureau of Environmental Inspection’s Northern, Central and Southern regional offices. In addition, every two months details of the percentage of repeated complaint cases that have been successfully dealt with is submitted to the project commissioning party, to help improve the quality of public nuisance complaint handling. 4. Expansion and maintenance of the Public Nuisance Complaint Handling GIS Platform: This involves the integration of GPS (Global Positioning System) and GIS (Geographical Information System) systems, utilizing the revealed locational affinity of complaint cases to support and enhance on-site handling performance by inspection personnel, and making it possible for coordinating managers to designate particular areas as “hotspots” using the zone warning function, on the basis of the density of public nuisance complaints. This new functionality will facilitate the accumulation of experience and the transfer of this experience to new personnel, while also, ideally, making it possible to achieve greater predictive accuracy.

relief, pollution, Petition, environment protection