This week the Toronto Star spent a few column inches discussing the lethargic pace of the City of Toronto’s attempt to bring a 311 telephone service to life. While Toronto has been at this project for five years and counting, Halton Region began development of its 311 service three years ago and completed it in March.
Developing a city-wide service in Toronto is inherently more complex than in Halton because it has to serve more than five times the population of that municipality. But also know that as a single tier municipality, Toronto is responsible for providing all the services that the Region of Halton provides and those that are administered by Halton’s lower-tier municipalities (Oakville, Burlington, Milton and Halton Hills).
Now with that said, five years should be plenty of time to get a 311 system up and running. What’s stopping this process is, according to one councillor I spoke to, that the most marginal city councillors are scared for their jobs. These councillors make up such a portion of council that they were able to axe the 311 development budget in half, from $65 million to $32 million, effectively giving it the lobbyist registry treatment.
What 311 will do is dramatically reduce the need for a constituent to call their councillor’s office to have a pothole fixed, a tree removed or garbage picked up (among other things). Instead, Jane Constituent will phone up 311 and tell a City staffer what they need. Jane will immediately get a tracking number and the request will be passed on to the appropriate department.
For the councillors whose bread and butter is constituency work, the fear is 311 will work too well. If all goes to plan, calls to councillors’ offices will drop dramatically because there will be a single user-friendly portal to access every City service. But if that were to happen, council’s laziest pols will have far fewer opportunities to take credit for wading into the bureaucracy on behalf of a voter, er, constituent. Instead, the dead weights on council might have to roll up their sleeves and dig into the real issues that face our city to demonstrate their utility to residents. What a concept!
Photograph by slowitdown.
5 comments
I use 311 frequently New York – it’s fantastic. Before 311 came along, I don’t think I ever reported anything because it was impossible to do so. Now you can report anything, and I when I need some info or want something done I do call and the results come surprisingly fast.
Yes, it is like calling a distant call center staffed by people who only know what their computer screen tells them, but believe me it does work. That little recorded action request grinds its way through the system and then gets done because no one in Mike Bloomberg New York wants bad stats. It’s not so much that these things couldn’t get done before but now they are getting tracked and people are being held accountable – so stuff happens. I like being part of that force of change as much as the item I am calling about. Somewhere, a lazy city worker is not so lazy because a flood of trackable action items are coming at them and there is nowhere to hide.
As for local pols, I could care less. I’ve never called my councilman’s office and don’t ever plan to. 311 is my friend who listens – my councilman is focused on his special interests and does nothing for me. No kidding that Toronto pols are freaking out.
By the way, note that together with 311, New York also put a ton of stuff online. All buildings dept info is online (permits, actions, etc.) You can fill out an online form for reporting graffiti in the park. You can pay red-light camera tickets online. After 7 years of effort, the whole bureaucracy shows signs of being a mini-Bloomberg LP, which is exactly the point.
I’m not sure this title is right. It’s not that the pols in question are lazy – they just want to work hard at things they know how to do. The problem is that we shouldn’t need them to do these things, we need citizens to be able to engage directly and only consult a councillor in occurrences where 311 fails. Councillor and councillor staff time should be pointed at higher-order functions in city governance. The problem with this is, as noted above, people vote more often based on the “parish pump” stuff than city planning or policy.
The councillor most directly associated in the media with constituency work as opposed to policy is… Rob Ford. Therefore, 311 should be marketed as getting rid of “small time” rather than “lazy” councillors, surely?
Mark,
I think you are setting up a false distinction. I think the role of the councillor should be to be good at both the lower-level (through his/her office at least) and the higher-level stuff. I can’t help but think that a good understanding of how things screw up at ground level would help immensely in the ability to frame effective policies and plans. All too many “higher-level” decisions are being made in this city by councillors who have very little understanding of how these things will actually affect citizens. Witness the disaster of the current giant blue bin recycling program in inner city Toronto, where many homes just don’t have the space for these behemoths. (To which Councillor Paula Fletcher says she might have voted differently on this program if she had seen the actual bins first hand in advance.)
Mark, I considered that distinction but I stand by lazy (though “small time” is also apt). Lazy is sitting around reaching for the low hanging fruit because it’s easy while watching the tree that fruit grows on rot.
I honestly don’t think any councillor puts in less than 50 hours during the average week (and most probably put in closer to 60 with a few around 70 or 80) but simply being on the job isn’t enough. Lots of people get by in life by working a job that allows them to do the bare minimum. But in my opinion, that’s a lazy attitude and certainly not one we should be content with from our elected officials.
And to be clear, ‘thinking locally’ isn’t lazy. Acting almost exclusively locally, however, is. If that’s all a councillor wants to do then they should apply to be a another councillor’s constituency assistant. That job has a great degree of merrit at less than half the price of a councillor’s salary.
It’s announced 311 call center workers will be earning 27-30$ /hr! Way to go Miller union once again grabs you by the nuts and you answer their cries! 30$/hr to handle phone calls, what incentive is this for students paying upward to 10,000 year for education and a degree and working towards jobs that require expertise and training which intern will pay less than a Cell center job? Miller wake up! if you ran a business the business would be bankrupt in months, just like what you are doing to our city. OUT WITH MILLER.