When 310 Splits From 213, Some Callers Will Be Feeling Zoned Out

Excuse Daniel Tabor if he’s feeling a little disconnected these days. The Inglewood City Councilman is about to be separated from much of his municipal domain by the phone company’s desire to add a new area code in Los Angeles County.

On Nov. 2, when the breakup takes place, Tabor’s home will be in a different area code from City Hall. Thousands of residences and businesses throughout Inglewood and Hawthorne will be divided by a telephone fault line. And, so far, it doesn’t appear that the split will be amicable.

“I’d hate to call one of my neighbors and find out that I just made a long-distance call,” Tabor said. “This whole thing is going to be extremely problematic.”

The main hang-up so far has been the phone company’s reluctance to negotiate the division of the 213 and new 310 area code along city boundaries.

Pacific Bell officials say that the splitting of cities was unavoidable because telephone exchanges and municipal boundaries are not related. So Inglewood, Hawthorne, Beverly Hills, Culver City, West Hollywood and five other cities in the county will find themselves separated by the old and new numbers.

The telephone company unveiled the plan nearly two years ago, saying that the new 310 area code, which will include most of the coastal cities in Los Angeles County, is needed because it was running out of phone numbers.

On Monday, the east side of the San Francisco Bay Area was switched from 415 to the new 510 area code. In November, 213 will split to include 310. And one year later, parts of area code 714 will switch to 909.

“We recognize that it’s an inconvenience, but there was nothing else we could do,” said Pac Bell spokesman Michael Runzler. “With everybody using pagers and fax machines and cellular phones, we had no other choice.”

But, because the telephone boundaries aren’t compatible with city lines, “short of rewiring the entire telephone network, some of the splits were inevitable,” Runzler said.

For Hawthorne, that means several thousand residents east of Crenshaw Boulevard will have an area code that is different from the rest of the community. Parts of the sprawling Northrop Corp. aircraft division will also be split by the new numbers, requiring officials there to print new letterheads and business cards for employees in neighboring facilities.

“It will entail a new way of business for a certain length of time,” said Ron Owens, a Northrop Corp. spokesman. “Certainly, it will be a little bit confusing for awhile.”

And in many cases, businesses and residents across the street from each other will be in separate long-distance zones. In Bell Gardens, for example, the current 213 and the new 310 area codes will bisect the business district, forcing one bank to dial long-distance to reach its biggest customer across the street.

Although many city officials feared that the division might clog emergency phone lines, Pac Bell officials say that the split will not delay responses by police, fire and paramedic units in any of the affected towns.

Despite assurances by the phone company that the new area codes will have no effect on rates--officials say the calls between the different zones will be billed as local calls--not everybody remains convinced.

“I find it hard to believe that it won’t affect the rates,” said James H. Mitsch, Hawthorne city manager. “We have always been against it, and we would rather not see it happen, but how they do their business is not up to us. Still, there’s no question that we weren’t able to give any input on the plan, and we expect to get lots of complaints.”

Still, some of the cities that will get a new area code expect no problems. In Avalon, officials say the issue hasn’t even caused a ripple around the island.

Until the city joined the rest of the high-tech world in 1978, “Avalon had the most antiquated phone system in America,” according to Wayne Griffin, executive director of the chamber of commerce.

That year, the island stopped using a manual switchboard to direct calls, so users were no longer required to tell the operator the two-digit number they were trying to reach. Since then, they’ve been part of 213 and are soon to be part of the new 310 zone.

“It isn’t going to make any difference at all,” Griffin said. “Nobody considers it important.”