Photo By David Poe | A Team Bliss family member speaks to senior leaders and directors at the quarterly...... read more read more
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The Fort Bliss Senior Commander Housing Town Hall meeting was hosted by Col. Matthew Eichburg, the 1st Armored Division and Fort Bliss acting commander, at the Centennial Banquet and Conference Center at Fort Bliss, Texas, March 3.
The forum offered residents an update on privatized military housing advancements at Bliss, now one year after a formal review of privatized homes military-wide, as well as provided an outlet for direct input from Soldiers and families.
The quarterly meeting was held in tandem with more than 30 monthly housing area unit sponsorship community forums that have occurred across Bliss since Sept. 2019.
The 1st AD and Bliss Garrison’s command teams were joined by representatives from Balfour Beatty Communities, Bliss’ Residential Communities Initiative partner, for the meeting. BBC manages almost 4,500 homes in 17 neighborhoods at Bliss. In all, the company manages approximately 43,000 homes across the Department of Defense.
RCI is an Army program formed as a result of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1996, which allowed services to partner with private industry to manage housing on military installations.
BBC and the command teams were flanked by senior local experts in preventive medicine, education, environmental protection, and others who were on hand to answer questions from community members.
During the approximately 90-minute meeting, BBC reps touted the value of the RentCafe app for submitting and managing work orders. Forty percent of all work orders at Bliss are now submitted online. They also shared news of their hirings on a regional level, as well as 20 new local positions, 19 of which focus upon maintenance or customer service.
“[The regional managers] aren’t people that you typically see,” said Jessica Holston, the BBC community manager at Bliss, “but they’re a big help to us -- the people on-the-ground.”
BBC, Army leaders, and the community also systematically went over the policy and standard advancements and customer service focus changes that occurred in 2019, which saw an almost $750,000 investment in playgrounds alone, with the same expected in 2020.
Before opening the floor the community guests were informed of all of their “points of contact when a housing issue isn’t solved expeditiously. Also, as common from earlier town halls, the garrison commander, Col. Stu James, reiterated the value of the Interactive Customer Evaluation system. Services at Fort Bliss, as well as most DoD offices worldwide, can be evaluated by customers online at https://ice.disa.mil. ICE is a DoD program that offers commanders and managers access to customer feedback in real-time so that immediate changes or plans for chronic issues can be initiated.
In closing, James said although the Army and RCI relationship may have lost some focus in a Post 9/11 world, more uniformed oversight in housing is coming, and recent and coming advancements in housing at Bliss will benefit military housing residents long term.
“In the last decade-and-a-half, we’ve distanced ourselves (from military housing), the Army realizes that,” said James. “We’re now circling back to address those problems. To solve that problem is to get the unit back involved. We’re starting to do that again. You’re starting to have chains of command get back into [housing] -- as it should.
“We should be the most-disciplined community in the United States,” James said, “because we all have a chain of command.”
| Date Taken: | 03.03.2020 |
| Date Posted: | 03.10.2020 16:21 |
| Story ID: | 364908 |
| Location: | FORT BLISS, TX, US |
| Hometown: | EL PASO, TX, US |
| Hometown: | LAS CRUCES, NM, US |
| Web Views: | 108 |
| Downloads: | 2 |
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