🔭 PLATFORM VIEW: Ana Bailão’s Plan to Fix 311

🔗 LINK: anabailao.ca/latest-news/fixing-311

🔧 DOABLE? Definitely.

💰 COSTED? No.

✨ OVERALL: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ (Three out of five)

Let’s end the week on a more positive note. One of the things I always appreciated about Ana Bailão when she was a city councillor is that she spent a lot of time in the weeds. She’d do the assigned readings.

That knowledge and expeience commons through with sensible policies like this one, which is designed to improve City Hall’s much-derided 311 service.

311’s latest annual report paints a picture of a service with a lot of promise that’s stuck on hold. Despite significant investments in technology, just 6% of service requests were initiated online in 2022. 81% of requests were initiated by phone call.

And the service standard for answering calls isn’t super ambitious. 311 seeks to have “80% of calls answered within approved service standard [of] 75 seconds.” They couldn’t hit even that in 2022 — they only managed 76%. There’s been a general gradual decline over the last few years.

So that’s at least two big onvious problems: people aren’t using the website, presumably because they don’t trust it or it’s hard to use or both, and calling 311 is generally an unpleasant experience.

Bailão propoes a series of improvements, including “[expanding] 311 service across all City Divisions to provide residents with a single point of contact for all service requests”, “[allowing] residents to track the progress of their 311 service requests“ and making it so “each division head will be directly accountable to the Mayor for their performance against defined service levels.”

Much of this is “Wait, that’s not already happening?” territory. Making sure people can track their 311 service requests should be table stakes for example. And Bailão should justly wear some criticism for not doing enough to change this when she was at City Hall for 12 years. But it’s nice to see the problems identified clearly

I’ve got two criticisms. First, this plan should be costed. It probably wouldn’t come out to a huge figure becuase it’s mostly about improving processes, not hiring more people, but there’s still a cost, and it should be accounted for.

Second, there’s not enough recognition here that one of the reasons 311 is bad is because City services are too often bad. People have too many legitimate things to complain about. To that end, I’d like to hear more from Bailão — and other candidates! about costed strategies to also improve baseline services.

But even in that fantasy world where city services are actually decent, there will still be a need for a service like 311 — so we might as well make it the most effective kind of 311 we can. Points to Bailão for some solid ideas.

PLATFORM VIEW is a daily(ish) feature by City Hall Watcher on Substack Notes. Got a request for a candidate policy proposal I should review? Let me know.