Only 21% of Bostonians Know the Mayor's Constituent Service Phone Number

The results of the online poll are in regarding the phone number for delivery of constituent services to Boston residents, and the results are likely to raise a challenge to Mayor Thomas Menino's current constituent service hotline.

Bill Oates, the Chief Information Officer for the City of Boston, told the Boston Globe that "residents are comfortable with the mayor's long-established hot line."

Not so. An online poll held here at Brighton Centered over the last week-and-a-half shows that, among the well-wired readers of this website, only 21% knew the correct phone number of the "Mayor's 24-Hour Constituent Service Hotline": 617-635-4500.

A similar 21% of respondents seemed to think that the city already uses "311" for constituent services. The city doesn't, even though many think it should.

It looks like switching the current, poorly-known phone number to an easily-remembered "311" wouldn't cause much of a disruption because few people know the current number.

The city receives far fewer calls to their constituent service hotline than comparable cities with "311" service. This online poll demonstrates that the likely reason is that most people don't know what number to call.

A surprising 12% of respondents thought that they should call "911" to report a pothole to be filled. A major justification a decade ago for having a "311" service in Baltimore was to free up "911" from handling non-emergency calls, and this poll shows that the potential for misuse of "911" continues in Boston.

A substantial 17% of respondents thought of calling the Mayor's City Hall office directly with 617-635-4000 -- rather than his constituent service hotline -- while 6% would call Paul Holloway, the Allston-Brighton liaison in the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Services (617-635-3485). Another 7% would call fictitious numbers (617-635-9311 and 888-3-BOSTON).

One of the "wrong" answers was actually a correct answer: 10% of respondents would bypass the Mayor's constituent service hotline by calling the Department of Public Works directly at 617-635-4900.

One commenter to a previous post here at Brighton Centered noted that he has the number saved on his cell phone, hence trying to remember the number might not be a good test; I should have included an option "I don't know because I've saved it on my phone already." I note, on the other hand, that I failed to provide an additional choice for respondents,"I have no idea", causing many people -- like my wife -- not to bother responding altogether. Note also that one of the links in the articles at Brighton Centered actually included the correct answer... so some people may have been tipped off. I predict that a more scientific poll of Boston residents would produce significantly fewer than 21% correct responses.

City Council Continues 10-Year Battle for 311 Service

The City Council held hearings Thursday on an improved constituent service hotline. Despite the Boston Globe's recent trumpeting of the issue, they buried coverage of the Council hearing to page B4 (probably because City Editor Brian McGrory vowed in 2003 "never spill a drop of ink writing about the Boston City Council") -- and then buried the most alarming quotation towards the bottom of the story:

[Boston Chief Information officer Bill Oates] acknowledged a switch to the catchy and simple 311 could elicit a flood of new calls.

"One of the challenges of 311 is we don't want to turn the button on 311 and have a volume [of calls] that will overwhelm the capacity of the call center," Oates said. He said city officials are currently focused on improving the city's response to calls made to the mayor's hot line. "It's a fairly well-known number," Oates said.

Yes, you read that correctly: a top city official doesn't want to roll out a service that more people would call -- he wants to keep the call volume at its current, low level.

The city's CIO also seems to think that the phone number of the Mayor's hotline is well-known, which is a disputable assertion. (See poll below.)

On top of that, a quick search of the record shows that the City Council has been lobbying -- unsuccessfully -- for the 311 service for over a decade.


The Phone Number Few People Know -- Or Call

The truth seems to be both that Boston's current system has a very low call volume compared to comparable cities, and that most residents don't know where to call.

The population of Baltimore is only 20% larger than Boston, yet its 311 service -- the first ever rolled out in the U. S. -- receives about 3000 calls (4.6 calls per 1000 residents) compared to Boston's 450 (0.8 calls per 1000 residents) to the "Mayor's 24-Hour Constituent Service Hotline." And of Boston's small number of calls, the city claims that around 80% are never logged because they are merely informational requests, not complaints. That leaves Boston with only 80 substantive calls per day (0.14 per 1000 residents) to the Mayor's hotline. New York City? Forty thousand calls per day to their 311 number since it started in late 2002, or 5.0 calls per 1000 residents.

Why so few calls in Boston? Are there no potholes in the city?

In last fall's Allston-Brighton District 9 City Councilor campaign, at a candidates' forum I asked one candidate, Rosie Hanlon, if she ever used the Mayor's hotline (she said no); a number of other candidates privately admitted the same. Only half of the candidates for Councilor-At-Large claimed to have used the system when responding to a written questionnaire. (Two other candidates dodged the question, while Councilor Felix Arroyo candidly admitted, like Hanlon, to never having called the number.)

In my roles both as a blogger and a member of several civic groups, I often hear complaints about city services. Very, very few people in my experience know the phone number of the Mayor's hotline; many people don't even know that the hotline exists. And those people are the ones who are involved at some level in community events -- civic leaders and long-time, not transient, residents. (Some of the noisiest complainers in Brighton have admitted to me they have never called the number!)

It's quite clear to me: the Mayor's 24-Hour Constituent Service Hotline doesn't get many calls because most people either don't know it exists, or don't know the phone number off the top of their head.

When you combine that observation with CIO Oates' statement that the city doesn't want an increase in call volume anytime soon, the cynical argument is that the city wants to keep the current system to avoid dealing with constituents and their complaints.


City Council Held Hearings About Rolling Out 311 Service -- In October 1997

In the 1996 presidential campaign, President Bill Clinton gave a speech in Sacramento, California pushing the concept of a city services phone number for non-emergency services, as part of his support for community policing. The City of Baltimore rolled out their service in October 1996, and the Federal Communications Commission approved the use of the 3-1-1 phone number in February 1997.

Former Allston-Brighton District 9 City Councilor Brian Honan joined with current Councilor-At-Large Stephen Murphy to hold hearings in October 1997 (archive fee) to look into having a 311 service in Boston:

Lost pets, illegally parked cars, noisy parties, cars blocking driveways and a host of other issues are regularly fielded by emergency operators, according to City Councilor Brian Honan. He said he is concerned that the calls bog down the 911 system, making it more difficult for police, fire and emergency officials to promptly respond to more serious emergencies "In terms of Boston, there is a significant number of nuisance calls into our 911 system," said Honan, who represents the Allston-Brighton district and proposed the hearing along with Councilor at Large Stephen J. Murphy. "We're going to examine the issue to see if it's a feasible, viable option to adopt a 311 system."

Murphy, who chairs the Committee on Public Safety, which will hold the hearing, said the concept mimics a program in Baltimore, where the number of calls to 911 dropped by 43 percent as a result of the new public nuisance line.

The Globe recently noted that Councilor Murphy "has been pressing the city to adopt 311 for nearly a decade"; actually he's been doing it for just over a decade, albeit more to relieve "nuisances" from the 911 line than to deliver constituent services.

Despite this pressure, city officials aren't totally giving in, according to the Globe: "[Mayor Thomas] Menino's spokeswoman, Dot Joyce, said the existing hot line has served the city well."

Which might be true if "well" means having a number that few people seem to know and even fewer call.


Online Poll

I have put up an online poll about what number you should call if you wanted to have a pothole filled today. No Peeking! No Searching Online! The point is to see if the readers here know, off the top of their heads, what number to call.

To vote, you have to load the full website in a browser.

Councilor Flaherty Fires Opening Salvo of the 2009 Mayoral Campaign

I recently wrote on this blog that Councilor Michael Flaherty years ago called for the City of Boston to adopt the "CitiStat" system to track constituent service complaints. Since it is well-known that Councilor Flaherty is interested in running for Mayor, I predicted that he would raise up this issue after the Boston Globe published an article in Sunday's newspaper about how long Mayor Thomas Menino's administration is taking to roll out such a service:

I am under the impression that Councilor Flaherty and his team consider this one of his signature issues, so the Globe story in Sunday's paper will add fuel the fire of his Mayoral ambitions by giving him a strong issue for campaigning. Mayor Menino therefore has a deadline for rolling out his version of the system before election day in November 2009 -- not in 2010, the date told to the Globe by Bill Oates, the city's chief information officer.

I pointed out that the Globe article missed this key element in their story. Councilor Flaherty seems to agree, because today he sent out a bulk email making the same point:

In its extensive coverage of Boston's citizen complaint tracking efforts, the Globe's article contained a glaring oversight: Since 2005, I have been pushing for the city to adopt CitiStat -- an online accountability and assessment tool for tracking constituent services as well as long-term planning goals.

In fact, I am holding yet another hearing on Thursday to debate the feasibility of implementing the tracking program in Boston.

Is Councilor Flaherty going to make this into an issue for the Mayoral race? You betcha. His email continues to attack the "Administration", although without explicitly naming the Mayor:

In the end, our city's stubbornness hurts everyday residents who just want the city to respond to their needs in a timely and responsible manner...

Had the [Menino] Administration listened three years ago when a tracking system like CitiStat was first proposed, perhaps we too could have claimed three years of savings and quality constituent services. I am hopeful that we can all get serious about saving residents money and delivering better services...

I strongly encourage the Administration to take an active role in this debate.

I believe we have just heard the opening salvo of the 2009 Mayoral campaign.

The public hearing Councilor Flaherty refers to will be held on Thursday, April 10, at 1 pm in the Boston City Council's Iannella Chambers. Bring your own ordinance. Remember to look both ways before entering the chamber.

David Berstein of the Boston Phoenix's Talking Politics Blog thinks that Mayor Menino's actions are part of a broader pattern where: a City Councilor occasionally comes up with a good idea: Mayor Menino takes the idea as his own via a press conference; and then Menino doesn't follow through with implementing the project. Bernstein adds the example of the city-wide Grove Hall-wide WiFi system. Bernstein has, in effect, proposed Boston's new parlor game: come up with other examples.

More On 311 -- And Could It Be Flaherty's Issue in 2009?

In a nice piece of investigative reporting, the Boston Globe found out how little the city has progressed in the last two years in rolling out a city-wide constituent complaint tracking service (often referred to as a "311" service). While the city has a system called the Mayor's 24-Hour Constituent Service Hotline, the system doesn't provide full tracking of complaints throughout the city's various departments, resulting in little knowledge as to how well complaints are resolved.

The Globe story fails to note five rather important angles to the story:

1. There already is an online constituent service webform (actually two webforms!) that generates a small (but non-zero) amount of tracking information;
2. The online webform that accepts complaints about building, health, housing, code enforcement, environmental services, and weights and measures has been broken for more than one year for at least some web browsers;
3. The city has begun regularly summarizing various departments' performances through average response times to complaints, despite not having a system fully trackable to the public;
4. Mayor Thomas Menino may very well be slow to embrace a city-wide 311 system because he has already associated constituent services with his "Mayor's Constituent Service Hotline"; and
5. One of Mayor Menino's likely challengers next year, Councilor Michael Flaherty, has been pushing the 311 service, and may renew his push if Mayor Menino doesn't get the new system running soon.
   

The Globe story noted that Mayor Menino vowed two years ago to roll out such a complaint tracking service by the end of 2006, but city officials now say that it may be 2009 or 2010 before the system is ready -- and for a total price tag of $4 million.

Why the service has been so slow to roll out was not addressed in the Globe story. I can guess that the basic problem is that various city departments probably use different software to do their core tasks, so the process requires bringing all of their work under a common system. That is an awfully hard task when you're dealing with a large organization -- although New York City was able to do so relatively quickly for $20 million in 2003. Where there's a will there's a way.


Online Constituent Services. The Globe story completely missed the fact that constituent complaints can be submitted online, not just by phone (617-635-4500). Why does this matter? An online complaint (eventually) returns a ticket number, so that you can keep track of the complaint; phone calls do not generate a ticket number. The number helps for follow-up calls -- but you still cannot view the status of the complaint online, ticket number or not.

Weekend staffing for the online form has been spotty in my experience: once I even received an email on Monday morning from a city employee saying that I shouldn't use the online form over the weekend because it wouldn't necessarily be answered. (I have subsequently been told that requests submitted online during the weekend are being read over the weekend, but I have not confirmed that in practice.)


Broken Web Forms. One or more of these web forms has been broken for well over one year, at least in my browsers (Firefox, Konqueror, Opera). The form fails to identify any street address that I enter in order to submit a building complaint (e.g., work after hours). The building, health, housing, code enforcement, environmental services, and weights and measures departments probably think that nobody is submitting complaints online; in fact, since the web forms fail for at least some people (like me), people are stuck sending their complaints back to the Mayor's 24-hour line.


City Department Tracking of Response Times to Constituent Complaints. To his credit, Mayor Menino is using measured metrics to track the response of his various departments to constituent complaints. For example, in 2006 88% of potholes were filled within 24 hours. Obviously, some amount of information is getting stored and analyzed in the current system -- which seems to obviate the need for the Boston Globe to do their own investigation of the city's response to 50 randomly selected complaints, since the city's statistics cover a much larger statistical sample.


Why Turn the "Mayor's 24-Hour Constituent Service Hotline" Into the "City of Boston Constituent Service Hotline"? Come on, Globe, recognize the obvious reason why the Mayor doesn't want to get rid of the "Mayor's 24-Hour Constituent Service Hotline" by creating a "311 Constituent Service Hotline." Do you detect a word that would disappear from the name? Much of an elected municipal official's work is in constituent services, so they understandably want to claim the credit for their (staff's) work. Why not call it the "Mayor's 311 Constituent Service -- That You Can Also Access By Calling 617-635-4500?" I think that name is catchy.

Wait... Councilor Sam Yoon already thought of that idea, and told it to the Boston Globe two years ago:

Some inside City Hall believe Menino may be reluctant to give up a number that's become part of his own urban brand. ''I recognize the mayor, for good reason, could be worried that he'll lose the connection he has with people through the mayor's hot line," says Yoon.

Yoon's solution: ''Let's call it 'the Mayor's 311.' "

Councilor Flaherty Has Been Pushing For 311 Service. In last fall's campaign for Boston City Councilor-At-Large, three of the current office holders -- Councilors John Connolly, Michael Flaherty, and Sam Yoon -- responded to a questionnaire here on the Brighton Centered Blog about revamping the constituent services system. Councilor Connolly called for a 311 service; Councilor Yoon expressed how impressed he was with Somerville's 311 service, and that Boston should improve their service; and Councilor Flaherty noted that he called for the city to implement a "CitiStat" system four years ago:

COUNCILOR MICHAEL FLAHERTY: The city has an obligation to responsibly and efficiently meet the needs of constituents. However, I am unsure that the 24-hour hotline is the appropriate tool as it lacks the ability to track constituents’ requests. That is why we need CitiStat, which is a government accountability program that I called for in 2004. CitiStat enables every request to be tracked so that the city – and its residents (by phone or internet) – can comprehend how quickly and adequately requests are addressed.

I am under the impression that Councilor Flaherty and his team consider this one of his signature issues, so the Globe story in Sunday's paper will add fuel the fire of his Mayoral ambitions by giving him a strong issue for campaigning. Mayor Menino therefore has a deadline for rolling out his version of the system before election day in November 2009 -- not in 2010, the date told to the Globe by Bill Oates, the city's chief information officer.