Phone Law Has a Nice Ring; Effect Is Fuzzy

Consumers need all the help they can get, right?

That must be why there was so much enthusiasm for a new California law requiring state agencies to answer phone calls within 10 rings. The state Senate voted for it 30 to 3 and the Assembly 72 to 0. It got good press coverage, not just from local papers but in the Wall Street Journal as well.

And why not? “It’s offensive not to have the people’s government responsive to the people,” says the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward).

But one must look closer at this people’s law, which raises the question of what laws should be. Some think that this is moonbeam legislation of the sort expected from a state once accused of having a moonbeam governor--and still considered a bit far out. And they don’t expect much for the consuming public in a law that has, in the words of state Sen. Leroy Greene (D-Carmichael), such “a high coefficient of asininity.”

Asinine or not, it’s really simple. All state agencies must establish some procedure guaranteeing that if it’s a public line and regular business hours and no emergencies or illnesses have cut the staff, calls will be picked up in 10 rings.

The mechanics of the law are even simpler: There are none. No one monitors calls, no one counts the rings, no one checks that there is a procedure. There is no enforcement and no punishment.

The problem addressed is real and indisputable and not just limited to California: Whole generations age and die, slowly, trying to get through to state bureaucracies. Lockyer offered just a few examples as background for his bill. One was California’s Franchise Tax Board, apparently budgeted to answer only 60% of its calls in 1987-88 and actually answering 50.6%. Another involved the secretary of state, whose corporate name availability unit was audited one day in March, l989, when it answered only 169 out of 19,070 calls.

Lockyer’s co-sponsor, state Sen. Jim Nielsen (R-Chico), gets the most constituent complaints about the Department of Motor Vehicles, but his own staff is “regularly put on hold” at almost any state office. Indeed, after three days of futile calls to one office some years ago, he had to send someone over in person to arrange a return call.

In Lockyer’s view, such a “persistent complaint” demanded attention, as did the consumer problem addressed in his companion legislation last year--an equally successful bill encouraging consumers to take utilities, cable companies and certain retailers to small claims court if they didn’t make their repair calls or deliveries within four hours of their appointment time. Here, 10 rings seemed “a reasonable time to wait,” and the lack of any consequence at all seemed appropriate because “we should try to motivate people by setting positive goals rather than just setting punishment.”

He was even understanding of what he found to be “a conscious policy not to answer the phone” in some agencies. “It isn’t really the secretary of State’s fault,” he says. “They’re just not given the budget.” Such agencies are “victims of the Department of Finance’s fiscal experts,” who only approve staffing levels “that will permit you to answer 60% of calls.” (The Department of Finance, whose recommendations are incorporated into the governor’s budget, does review an agency’s stated work load and staffing, but “we just aren’t going to get down to that level,” says Richard Ray, a program budget manager at the department.)

The Lockyer bill did meet some early opposition and was amended to satisfy it. The governor had vetoed it the previous year because it didn’t allow for the effect of any staff illnesses or emergencies, and allowance for those was added to the bill. The Department of Motor Vehicles was concerned about little one-man offices, where phones might sometimes have to ring unanswered, and the bill was revised to apply only to offices “where staff is available.” The Department of Finance was concerned about budgetary effects, and exceptions were therefore permitted where “compliance would require overtime or compensating time off.”

Some people still thought the bill utterly useless, and lack of enforcement was only one factor. After all, any office could get around the requirement by having its phones picked up within 10 rings by an answering machine or a device asking callers to hold--a worse situation for consumers, who are charged when the call goes through.

Aside from useless, it seemed “silly” to state Sen. Robert Presley (R-Riverside) to have a law mandating something that agency administrators should be doing as a matter of course. And to Leroy Greene it was not just silly but “pointless legislation,” ineffectually addressing what is “obviously a universal problem--with telephone companies, utilities, welfare, customer service offices of all kinds, your doctor’s office. There’s no way it will work.”

No one argues with the concept behind this legislation. The question is whether there are some concepts that just clog up the civil code when the expressed problems are capable of solution elsewhere. Lockyer believes that “there’s some value in having a general statement of policy,” a kind of “consciousness-raising.” To Neilsen, the legislation is “more of what I would call a club, sending a strong message to clean up your act.”

Both consider it only a first step. True, there is no provision for anyone to oversee compliance, but there’s the “potential for oversight in future years,” says Lockyer. True, there’s no enforcement, but there’s the threat of “further legislation” if necessary, says Nielsen. For now, explains Lockyer, “I don’t want to over-legislate.”

But that’s just for now. Stay on hold. . . .