February 1, 2002

Bloomberg Plans Quick Start of Citywide 311Phone System

By DIANE CARDWELLIn the first major policy initiative of his administration, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg yesterdayoutlined plans for creating a new telephone system that would allow residents to dial one phonenumber -- 311 -- to obtain all city services, even as he acknowledged difficulties in creating sucha system in a city so large.Mr. Bloomberg also said that the plan, which envisions telephone operators fielding far-rangingservice inquiries from a population that speaks more than 100 languages, would do little toreduce the number of calls to 911, an effect the Giuliani administration had hoped for when itstudied a similar idea.''It's a big challenge in New York,'' Mr. Bloomberg said of enabling residents to dial the singlenumber for city services. ''We have enormous volume, we have a complex city, we have manydifferent languages spoken and we have a populace that rightly expects to have government beresponsive in ways that, in many other cities, government is not.'' Nevertheless, the mayor saidhe expected the city's system to begin operation and be connected to most services within a year.Houston, a city with 1.8 million people, by comparison, took about two years to start a similarprogram, according to Donald Hollingsworth, who designed and is overseeing it. Mr.Hollingsworth said that three of the agencies with the heaviest volume of calls had beenconnected to the system and that he expected the bulk of the rest to be connected by the middleof this year.The concept of the 311 system was born in the late 1990's under the Clinton administration in anattempt to relieve the burden on the 911 emergency system from people who used it innonemergencies. The first pilot program began in Baltimore and has since evolved into a morecomprehensive system that integrates the bulk of city services. Not only does it make it easierand faster for average residents to get the help they need, proponents say, but it also creates asystem for officials to track the performance of city agencies in meeting customer demands.In Chicago, for example, there is a single center where callers can receive information about cityevents, get access to city services and place nonemergency calls to the police, said Ted O'Keefe,director of the program. The center, which handled 675,000 requests for city services last year,