NEW YORK (AP) -- Think of it as the mayor's eyes and ears. On wheels.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg is sending 15 staffers out in golf cart-like vehicles to cover 300 miles of New York City streets each day to look for quality-of-life violations like litter piled on the sidewalk and potholes in the road.
"It's government's responsibility to find the problems and fix them, not to sit there and say 'Duh we didn't know.' That's not what good government is all about, that's not what customer service is all about,'' Bloomberg said Thursday in a Brooklyn playground where one of the so-called scooters was on display.
To demonstrate for reporters how an inspector might look while making the rounds, the mayor slipped behind the wheel of the vehicle and honked the horn.
The team of staffers, known as the Street Condition Observation Unit, or SCOUT, will work daytime on weekdays, slowly crawling the streets at a speed that allows each to cover about 20 miles per day. Inspectors will not have the power to write tickets or issue violations.
They will be charged with hunting down everyday bothersome problems like trash piled up in a lot, graffiti, fallen trees, clogged storm sewers, potholes, bumps in the road, damaged bus shelters, newspaper boxes in disarray, and malfunctioning traffic signs and signals.
Each inspector will carry a BlackBerry equipped with global positioning software that is also connected to the city's management center for its 311 system. The catchall hot line was established in 2003 as a resource for residents to get information and report various problems.
If the inspector sees a pothole in the middle of the street, he scrolls down a list of preprogrammed complaints on the BlackBerry and clicks it in. The location is automatically noted and logged at the 311 call center, which already fields thousands of such reports each day from regular callers.
The relevant agency is then notified so that the problem can be addressed.
Bloomberg, a bit of a neat freak who detests litter and often calls 311 himself, said he has always wanted to be able to dispatch staffers to go trolling for these types of annoyances.
"If you want to call 311, we still want to encourage you to do it, but too many times I drive down the street and go bouncing over a pothole, call 311 and nobody called it in,'' he said. "The more we're aware of the conditions on the streets of this city, the more effective we can be in addressing them.''
The mayor expects the SCOUT team will report 1,000 to 3,000 problems per day and will be able to cover all 6,000 miles of city streets each month when it's up and running by September.
The 311 system fields some 40,000 calls each day and already handles about 7,000 complaints of the type that these inspectors will be logging.
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