It's Our City is a project that uses TV, Radio and Web
to promote civic engagement in the Philadelphia region.3-1-1 gets another evaluation
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 4:40 pm - by Dan Pohlig. Filed under: Uncategorized.
The 311 scoreboad showed a lot of calls in January
Looks like the Daily News did a slightly more intensive survey of the 3-1-1 system’s performance than I did in my own experience from a couple weeks ago:
During our two-day trial - in which we made a total of 30 calls - we encountered friendly operators who worked hard to help us with our queries. But there were some long delays before calls were picked up, and sometimes operators couldn’t answer our questions.
For example, only one of three operators could provide the schedule for the upcoming community budget workshops.
Hmmm… perhaps we should give the 311 operators this website so they could have that kind of information at their fingertips.
Anyway, the DN also talked to call center manager Rosetta Carrington Lue to find out what kind of volume 311 did in January:
So far, 3-1-1 is off to a roaring start. In January, the service handled 99,378 calls. And 9-1-1 calls declined 1.7 percent, from 233,839 in January 2008 to 229,860 in January 2009.
(snip)
She said that operators have taken 4,797 service requests, 2,601 of which have been resolved, and that the city was working on the rest, said Lue.
Interestingly enough, State Representative Mark B. Cohen (or someone commenting under his name) took a little time to get out his calculator and discover that:
If there were 99,378 calls in January, and only 4,797 requests for services, that means about 95% of the calls were merely requests for information. The national experience is that 311 services cost about $3 per phone call. Assuming this is true for Philadelphia, it cost the city about $280,000 to give people information about city services in January.
Let’s assume for a moment that the $3 per phone call number is even close to accurate, which I doubt given how the overall system was set up for $2 million. Cohen (or the commenter using his name) suggests that such information could have been given out with far less expense if the city had “a higher quality, more information-rich website.” His point is well taken but if we refer back to the conversations I had a couple weeks ago with folks who have been involved with the set-up and implementation of 311, it’s clear that they expected information requests to far outnumber service requests (the New York City experience).
The point of 311, aside from lessening the burden on 911 by handling non-emergency requests, is to give a citizenry, mostly older, mostly without internet access or savvy, a way to call one number to find out anything they want to know about working with city government. Don’t get me wrong. I agree that the city should have a much better “information rich” website that is able to deliver many more services without requiring phone calls or in-person visits. But that would help me and the commenter since both of us are already pretty web saavy.
Does the city still have a ways to go before it realizes the full potential of 311? Judging from the Daily News article, the answer is yes. But criticizing the city for spending any money so that a little old lady in the lower Northeast can easily find out what do to with bulk trash seems a little harsh.
February 11th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
It’s not true that the whole system was set up for $2 million. Just fixing up the center from which the calls are made cost the city something like $4.2 million from 911 funds. Paying a staff of 46 people salaries plus benefits could easily cost $50,000 per person, and that would be $2.3 million right there, plus the cost of filling eleven current vacancies, plus the costs of equipment, plus the costs of software, plus the costs of preparing the information for the operators in the first place.
The cost of the 311 system, which will likely generate between two milllion and five million calls per year as more and more people learn about it, will easily exceed $6 million per year unless hours are shortened or some of the demand is redirected to the internet or elsewhere.
We have, we are repeatedly lectured, a major fiscal crisis that requires us to make hard choices. Yes, people like 311 and all other free services. Yes, it is convenient for people to find out hours for recreation centers, swimming pools, libraries, parks, and other city services.
But we are not going to be doing people a really big favor if we have to cut hours of popular services in order to pay for giving out information about their hours op operation.
Mayor Nutter is proceeding on contradictory tracks simultaneiously. First, he, to his credit, conciliatorily dropped the appeal of the Common Pleas Court decision keeping the 11 threatened libraries open.
Second, he made new threats to the coninued existence of branch libraries and other vital services based on pessimistic economic scenarios.
Third, he promised a revision of the city’s business tax structure, which will presumably lead to a further reduction in city revenues, as the business community would be horrified it led to tax increases.
The city’s budget crisis forces all concerned citizens to study the choices in the city budget more intensely than they ever have before.
Almost all city spending achieves worthwhile purposes and has advocates. The task for the Mayor, the City Council, and the citizenry as a whole is to determine what services are most valuable, and that reqauires detailed calculation of what is bought with each of the services. The calucations should not be the exclusive province of the mayor’s office or any other city office.