Drug dealers were using an abandoned minivan for target practice in Reservoir Hill, a block from an elementary school, so Irene Smith dialed 311 and asked the city to cart it away.
That would have been Smith's "one call to City Hall" if the telephone service had lived up to its slogan. Instead, she said, that was the first of more than 30 calls to remind, cajole and beg the city to remove the van.
The city finally towed the vehicle seven months later, but only after fed-up residents pushed it into an alley, forcing action because trash trucks couldn't get through.
"Three-one-one is a wonderful idea, and if it worked it would be the greatest thing to happen to the city bureaucracy since the Dewey Decimal System," said Smith, a lawyer with the Community Law Center. "But it cannot happen in isolation. It has to be coupled with city agencies that say they're going to do something and then actually do it."
Eight months after the city launched its 311 One Call Center to handle all manner of citizen complaints, the system faces criticism.
Callers say the problem is not with the call center per se, which, they say, generally does a good job of logging and keeping track of complaints, but with public works, parks, housing and other city agencies that are supposed to act on those complaints.
The agencies sometimes do not take action, at least not as quickly as they should, critics say. And the way the agencies report their progress to 311 can make them look more responsive and effective than they are - raising questions about the accuracy of the larger CitiStat system set up to track government performance.
City Council President Sheila Dixon suggested 311 could be contributing to a "numbers game," particularly because agencies have been reporting that they've resolved complaints when, in some cases, they have taken only a first step.
"If you take what we see here [in CitiStat reports] and you go out in the communities, it's not reflected," she said. "I don't see the connection."
City officials acknowledge they're working out kinks in the 311 system, which handles 15,000 calls a week and costs a little under $4 million a year to operate. But they maintain it has made municipal government more responsive and accountable.
"I never promised perfect when I ran for this job, but I did promise constant improvement, and that's what this system allows us to do," Mayor Martin O'Malley said. "It's better now than it was eight months ago, and eight months from now it will be even better."
In the past two months, 311 officials have taken steps to improve customer service at the call center. They've hired a new call center manager and more call takers, bringing the total staff to 46. And they have increased training and supervision for workers, who sometimes referred complaints to the wrong agency, where they could languish before being forwarded to the correct one.
The average caller waits 2 seconds, down from 5 or 6, for someone to answer the 311 line, said Lisa Allen, call center manager. The percentage of callers who give up before someone picks up is 3.6 percent, down from 13 percent, she said.
Now comes a tougher challenge: improving follow-through by the agencies.
"Some folks say 311 doesn't work. It's surely not the people who answer the phone," said Elliot Schlanger, the city's chief information officer. "I think we've done a good job of bringing those folks into the world of customer service. Once, in fact, the call is ... [logged], it's really a challenge that cities have had for hundreds of years: the ability to perform."
Among the main gripes about 311 is that when residents call to follow up on a complaint, they are told the problem has been "abated" - even though it looks like nothing has changed.
Callers might assume that city workers responsible for fixing the problem have been goofing off on the job. Officials with 311 recently have started checking up more on workers, bolstering an auditing system that deploys an undercover inspector who makes random checks with the aid of disguises and night-vision goggles.
But the officials don't think shiftless workers are the main problem. They offer another explanation that points up a flaw in the 311 system. Often agencies report that a problem has been abated once they have taken a first step toward resolving it. Yet the case might be far from closed, particularly if the matter involves private property. In such cases, the owner's legal rights can slow city action considerably.
City Councilman Edward L. Reisinger, who held a hearing on 311 last month, described what he said was a common scenario:
A call taker receives a complaint about bags of garbage piled by a house and refers it to the housing department. The agency sends out an inspector, who writes a violation notice to the property owner. Someone at housing then calls up the complaint in the 311 computer system and types in "abated" - even though the problem has not been fully resolved.
"The problem I've had is saying it's abated or closed, and it's not," Reisinger said. "It's the terminology. They should not say it's abated or closed until those bags ... are gone. The way it is now, they can turn around and say, 'It's closed in three days.' CitiStat's saying, 'Hey, this was done within one week. In one week they closed this.' But it's not closed."
Officials with 311 say they're addressing that terminology problem. They have started asking city agencies to put more detailed information into the computer system. That way, 311 operators can give callers a more accurate picture of what steps have been taken and what remains to be done.
"Our communication back to the customer is not all it should be," O'Malley said. "People want the weeds cut, and they don't really care to hear that the law requires us to issue a notice first. ... The 311 center cannot do away with due process. ... But we can do a better job of communicating what the customer's expectation should be."
When callers report complaints, they are told the city's target schedule for addressing them. For missed trash or recycling pickup, it's one day; sewer water in a basement, also one day; potholes, two days; illegal dumping, 21 days.
The city's track record for meeting those deadlines is mixed. Last month, the city met its goal for 100 percent of pothole complaints, 81 percent for recycling, 76 percent for sewer water, 52 percent for trash collection and 26 percent for illegal dumping.
For problems that aren't quick fixes, city officials are considering having call takers spell out scenarios for solving them instead of only relaying the target schedules, Schlanger said. But even then, it's sometimes hard to anticipate all of the factors that might affect the handling of a problem.
The van that Smith reported is a case in point.
Different agencies are authorized to tow abandoned vehicles depending on where they sit. If they're on a street or alley, it's transportation's job. If they're on private property, it's the responsibility of sanitation enforcement. Unless the lot is fenced or the property abandoned. Then it falls to housing.
The distinctions are not just a matter of bureaucratic buck-passing, officials note, but a question of who is empowered under the law to move a vehicle.
Sorting out responsibility was complicated in Smith's case because two wheels of the van were in a vacant lot, two in an alley. In one of Smith's many calls to 311, she said a call taker stayed on the line with her for two hours as agency after agency said removing the van was not its job.
Despite the complication, officials were at a loss to explain why it took seven months for the city to tow it away.
"Where the breakdown was ... we can't pinpoint," said Matthew D. Gallagher, director of operations for CitiStat.
He did have an explanation for the mishandling of another complaint from Smith, a frequent caller to 311 because she represents community associations in her job as a Community Law Center lawyer.
In July, she reported that a city-owned vacant lot in the 1300 block of N. Carey St. was filled with high weeds, trash and rats. She called back more than a month later to find out why nothing had been done and was told the problem had been abated. Smith reported that was not the case and made several more calls. As of late last week, the lot still looked like a jungle.
Gallagher said solid-waste workers removed trash and debris in September and closed out the case even though the weeds had not been cut. The workers should have passed along the weed complaint to another crew, a point Gallagher plans to stress to solid waste officials to keep that from happening again.
"There's not a lot of cities that are doing this," Schlanger said. "There isn't a textbook we can open up and see, 'Here's how you set up a city call center.' We're kind of writing the book as we go along."