State Ombudsman Bernardo Granwehr’s annual report on the complaints and inquiries to his office for 2024 shows a slight drop.
“My office opened over 5,700 cases, which is a slight decrease from fiscal year 2023 but still the fourth highest number of cases in the history of the office,” Granwehr says. The top two years for complaints came during the pandemic years of 2021 and 2022. He say complaints were up dramatically during the pandemic, but had been increasing even before the pandemic. “It’s also a 41% increase from 2014 — so about a decade ago — I always like to look back to see where we came from. So business is still booming, obviously in our office,” he says.
One thing that has stayed the same is the type of complaints they receive. “About half of our complaints are corrections or jails related, and about ten percent are human services, and the rest just run the gamut from state and local governments, about 24 percent, about a quarter of our complaints are state government, and about 18 percent are local government,” Granwehr says.
Granwehr says they have to make sure that those who file the complaints have exhausted any options to have the issue resolved before his office can review it. “When they have the opportunity to do so, we will go ahead and be able to evaluate that grievance process to see if it worked effectively,” he says. “But obviously, if they haven’t availed themselves of the sort of administrative process that the of the agency that they’re complaining about, then we have less to evaluate.”
He says he is glad to see things return to a more normal situation after the big increase in issues during the pandemic. “With the pandemic being kind of in the rear view mirror, the COVID pandemic, we have been able to move out of triage mode a little more and really dig into complaints,” he says. Granwehr has been the Ombudsman for three years and says one of the big accomplishments thus far is to the agency’s website redone. “I’m happy to say that obviously traffic is up. People are taking advantage of the resources on that website, and then also, complaints are being filed through the complaint form, online complaint form there at a clip, I think it’s 71% increase,” Granwehr says.
You can see the full year end report on the Ombudsman website at: ombudsman.iowa.gov.