Unraveling 911 Tangle With New 311 System Will Take Time

Hoping to ease the burden on the city’s overloaded 911 system, Los Angeles officials plan to build a $10-million telephone answering system to handle nonemergency calls.

But switching to a 311 system--envisioned as an all-purpose service to help unclog 911 lines--is so complicated that planners say it will take more than a year to set up even the bare bones.

Wiring and staffing the new network is only part of the challenge. There’s also the problem of helping operators figure out which of the 49 city departments, 20 commissions and boards, and 15 City Council offices--and which phone numbers within each agency--to zap calls to.

City Hall operators now have to flip through thick notebooks listing thousands of numbers to find the right one, with only a limited computerized database to help. The lists require constant updating, a massive task in a sprawling local government with more than 30,000 numbers.

As anyone who has ever tried to, say, get a tree branch trimmed, probably knows, residents dialing for help often get bounced like pingpong balls from one extension to another, sometimes confronting wrong numbers and busy signals.

Many callers have no idea which is the correct department, and telephone directories and the city’s Web site offer little help.

“It’s difficult, if you pick up a phone book, to figure out which department to call,” said Greg Dexter, the city’s 311 project manager. “If you need a garbage pickup, would you know to call the Department of Public Works?”

Probably not. But the 311 system, scheduled to be activated in July 2002, “will allow any city resident to call a single, easy-to-remember number for any nonemergency service,” Dexter said. “We hope it will significantly offload calls to the 911 system.”

The city receives about 62,000 nonemergency calls each day, including transfers. Half of all calls are transferred at least twice before the callers receive answers or submit requests, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers study commissioned by the city last year.

The effort to create a 311 system, advocated by former President Clinton as a national standard, comes while Los Angeles is struggling to answer thousands of 911 calls. Almost 12% of such calls were abandoned by frustrated callers last year, the worst tally that the emergency system has recorded since 1995, according to Los Angeles Police Department data.

In addition to making government more accessible and responsive, city leaders see the new 311 service as the best way to siphon nonemergency calls away from the 911 lines. Police officials have estimated that four out of five 911 calls are not genuine emergencies.

“It’s time for 311 to get up and running,” said Councilman Mike Feuer, who has been urging the city to build the system for four years. “There was a time for study, but now is the time for action. Otherwise, lives may literally be in danger.”

So far, the city has appropriated only $1.5 million out of the roughly $10 million needed for the 311 system. After more funding is secured, the next step will be to compile a massive service directory of city phone numbers, a $2-million project in itself.

Each department could then regularly update its content in the computerized directory, Dexter said, and operators could search the database using keywords without needing to know which department provides a service. Residents could also access the citywide directory via the Internet.

The city’s present call center, buried in an office four floors beneath City Hall, would be renovated to accommodate new 311 telephone lines and computers.

Information, not Emergencies

The 27 operators who now answer calls from a variety of seven-digit numbers would be retrained. Eventually the city plans to hire more operators, Dexter said.

In a single five-minute span on a recent afternoon, one operator handled the following calls: “I’m trying to get the number for the county municipal courts.” “I want to see if I can get housing rent control.” And, always a popular one: “Can you give me the name of my City Council member?”

One question looming over the 311 project is how well various departments will handle the expected surge in service requests. In other words, if you build it, they will come--and how would it look if callers dial 311, only to be switched to some frazzled agency swamped with calls?

In Dallas, the first major city to try an all-purpose 311 system, the demand was so high that the city had to add 30 operators on top of the existing 144. About 200,000 calls poured in when the service was introduced three years ago--so many that the city never had to advertise the new number, said Richard Taylor, Dallas’ assistant manager for the 311 and 911 systems.

“We were overwhelmed,” Taylor said. “When you open up a new service, there’s a pent-up demand.”

The Texas version of 311 hasn’t had much of an effect on 911 calls, according to Taylor. He said Dallas, which has conducted extensive public education about the 911 service, never had a major problem with nonemergency calls flooding that system.

Dallas now plans to start answering its 311 calls, expected to hit 1.2 million this year, with a partly automated service so that people with basic questions can use their touch-tone phones to get answers. Callers will still have the option of speaking to operators.

In Los Angeles, the PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that some city departments are much better prepared to handle customer calls than others.

Among those with the highest call volume--each receiving more than 1,000 calls a day--the Department of Building and Safety, the Department of Water and Power, and the Department of Public Works’ Sanitation Bureau earned the highest rankings for customer service. Getting the fewest calls was the city’s keeper of ball fields and swimming pools, the Department of Recreation and Parks.

The architects of the new 311 system plan to meet with each department to help get them all, from Aging to the Zoo, on the same page before the phones start to ring.

“The key to the whole thing . . . is getting the content into this citywide service directory and keeping it current,” Dexter said. “The departments are going to have to provide that basic information. If they’re not on board, it’s not going to work.”