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There is a playground on the Lower East Side that, theoretically at least, is open to the public during daylight hours. But when Susan Stetzer, who lives next door, would walk by, she often found its gates locked.
Each time she noticed, Stetzer took out her cell phone and called 311. A record was made of the problem, and sometimes the gates were opened. But sometimes they weren't. Eventually Stetzer used her role as the district manager of the local community board to find a permanent solution. When she did, her months of 311 calls helped establish evidence of a persistent problem - even if those calls didn't manage to solve the problem themselves. Stetzer and the community board recently reached an agreement with the parks department that will keep the playground's gates open during the day.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg established the 311 call center as a single hotline for non-emergency calls to the city in 2003, so that New Yorkers could more easily voice their concerns. Its first two years in operation have convinced many people of its potential - the number of calls to 311 has more than tripled, so that it now receives about the same number as 911. But two years is also time enough to reveal the system's shortcomings.
Some have noticed that the speed of service has slowed. "It was getting better and better and better, and then all of a sudden it got worse," said Stetzer, who grew accustomed to calling to report illegal sidewalk cafes and other problems she came across. Tired of the increasingly lengthy hold times, she recently assigned a member of her staff to call 311 for her.
Other concerns revolve around how the system is used in the context of city government as a whole. Stetzer and other managers and members of community boards across the city - who see handling constituent complaints as one of their primary functions - criticize the Bloomberg administration for not sufficiently integrating the community boards into its new system. Others have become impatient with the pace of expanding it as a management tool for city government.
So, after setting in motion a serious shift in the workings of city government, the Bloomberg administration is now being challenged to follow through.
"They're using technology to force changes in the way government works on some level," said Bruce Lai, a staff member for the City Council's committee on technology. "It's a long process - New York City government is massive."
When New York launched 311 in March 2003 it was not a new idea. In the late 1990s the Clinton administration conceived it as a way to lessen the burden on 911, and Baltimore and Chicago put the system in place years ago. But New York's system surpasses its predecessors in both scale and complexity.
The sizeable project, many say, seemed a logical undertaking for a businessman mayor who had run a media business that took some pains to provide clients with individualized attention."His City Hall equivalent to that sort of pampering is the new 311 telephone hotline," wrote Christopher Swope of Governing Magazine in August 2004.
It has arguably been the mayor's most sweeping change to city government. It has changed the way that the city takes complaints by:
These services have won over New Yorkers like Joey Arak, who first called 311 in the middle of one night last summer after a car alarm began blaring outside his Orchard Street apartment. The call resulted in the arrival of several police officers, who broke into the car, turned the alarm off, re-locked the car, and drove off.
Arak has only called 311 a few times since then, but his experience has turned him into something of a 311 zealot.
"Last week I was walking to work after grabbing lunch, and a teenage girl came up to me and said that the cashier in a nearby bodega stole her money and wouldn't give it back or something, and if I had seen any policemen pass by. My reply? 311. Whenever anyone has a parking question, my reply? 311." A 311 operator said that in fact it would probably be more appropriate to call 911 in the case of theft; 311 is clearly the better choice for parking advice.
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The numbers show that the city as a whole has taken to the system. In March 2003, about 310,000 people called 311; in May 2005, it fielded over one million calls. Still, there has been no major change in the number of annual calls to the 911 emergency system, which has remained steady at about 12 million a year.
Many people call 311 to complain - over the first two years, heat and hot water complaints and noise complaints were far and away the most common calls. But the city has found the system useful for other campaigns as well. About 96,000 people called 311 in May to request free nicotine patches, and 110,000 people called on September 30, 2004, largely to find out when they would get their $400 property tax rebate.
The system has also served as an aide to agencies and public officials. Even the public advocate's office, which runs an ombudsman line that would seem to be in direct competition with 311, has found its job made easier by the new hotline.
"Our call volume has actually gone up, because 311 transfers calls to us," said Anat Jacobson, a spokesperson for Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum. "It's been a really useful tool."
For Paul Lee, however, the experience has been more mixed. Lee calls regularly, "sometimes with great success and sometimes with abject failure." (He also posts neighborhood problems to Gotham Gazette's Fix-its.) streetlights or traffic signals go out, the problems are usually fixed quickly, said Lee, a community activist in Manhattan's Chinatown.
But he found that 311 was stumped on how to deal with a depression on Pell Street that had grown large enough that "cars [were] sinking into the thing." The city was unable to fix the problem for well over a year, and operators seemed confused and irritated when Lee described the problem interchangeably as a pothole and a sinkhole. The problem persisted until Lee saw a member of a Department of Transportation road crew on the street and asked for advice.
"He said 'Call it an undermine. When you say the word undermine, they know what you mean and we'll be right out.'" Lee did, and the problem was fixed within two weeks.
"When you get into a zone that has no clear delineation," said Lee, "then it gets a little weird."
Since the city launched 311 it has both increased the number of operators it employs and increased the system's budget. [The Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications did not provide exact statistics by press time].
Still, the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, is having some trouble keeping pace with its growing popularity. Between May 2004 and May 2005 - a period during which call volumes rose 46 percent - the average time a caller spent on hold went from 18 to 30 seconds, and the percentage of calls answered within 30 seconds dropped from 79 to 71 percent. Gino Menchini, the agency's commissioner acknowledges that this is "something that has to be managed," but also noted that the system is still meeting its goal of answering calls in an average of 30 seconds.
"We provide service levels that exceed and are better than what you could get at most banks or other types of customer service institutions," he said. "It's not surprising that as our call volume went up significantly that we had modest increases on hold times."
Making it easy to complain, of course, can lead to uncomfortable situations for those being complained about. Bloomberg discovered this immediately when 7,500 people called to complain about the mayor himself in the first three months the system existed, as reported in the New York Post. One caller accused the mayor of "putting people's lives in danger" by closing firehouses, another called him a "fool" for stating that the smoking ban would save 1,000 lives a year. (The mayor's office said this proved that people liked calling 311; besides, a spokesperson added, the calls made up only about 0.004 percent of the system's total volume.)
More seriously, the police department also saw a spike in the number of complaints to its Civilian Complaint Review Board despite what many say is a time of relatively low tension between police and civilians, a disconnect that the department explained by noting how easy 311 is to use.
Some restaurant and bar owners, meanwhile, say that the simultaneous implementation of the 311 system and another signature policy of the Bloomberg administration - the smoking ban - has been a "double whammy." The smoking ban, said Robert Bookman of the New York Nightlife Association, has pushed customers into the street, increasing tension with nearby residents. Even in times when no noise ordinance was actually being broken, he claimed, peeved neighbors found they could lash out at bars by anonymously calling 311 and making any kind of complaint, such as a report of a non-existent fight.
"We have considerable anecdotal evidence that people are using the system to complain that they don't like the bar down the block or the nightclub across the street," said Bookman. "It's causing unneeded inspections that disrupt the business and can sometimes kill the flow of the evening."
Some members of the City Council believe that these false complaints waste considerable city resources, and have proposed legislation that would require the 311 system to be able to trace callers much like the way 911 does (Intro 399); (Intro 509). Menchini questions the scope of the problem, and says asking 311 to keep track of callers will cause longer hold times without actually discouraging false complaints.
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While about four of every ten calls placed to 311 are immediately transferred to the correct agency, the system has always been envisioned as more than a citywide switchboard. Those who run 311 - and those who think they could run it better - are looking at other ways to use the system.
The 311 system has integrated the buildings department's schedule into its database, and 311 operators can now arrange for visits by city building inspectors. The Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications is now working with the New York City Housing Authority to do the same thing.
Others say that 311's real potential lies in the immense amount of data it has accumulated.
There has already been a move to take advantage of this. The police department recently announced that it was establishing a "Real Time Crime Center", which allows detectives to tap into the 311 database, along with several other information sources, to get timely data for investigations.
But critics say that the city has not done nearly enough.
"311 has been a way of directing phone calls better. It has not been used as a real management tool," said City Council Gifford Miller at a recent debate between the Democratic mayoral candidates. "What doesn't happen is the next step, which is to say, "Okay, we've received 20,000 phone calls. Where are those phone calls coming from, how can we now better direct our resources?'" The public advocate's office and community boards have made similar statements, saying that the data in the 311 system should be used more extensively in the budget process.
Menchini says that such data analysis has always been a part of the plan, and that critics should realize that the two-year old system is still developing.
"If you tried to do everything at once," he said, "you'd get nothing done."
Even if it is easier to complain about inattentive landlords, pothole-ridden streets, or noisy bars, the real question is whether these problems are actually getting fixed.
"At the end, when the agency doesn't do anything for you, all 311 has done is gotten you to a dead end," said Jacobson of the public advocate's office.
Jacobson notes that there are other avenues for people who need the city's help, and 311 has not eliminated the need for them. While the system can resolve simple issues, she said, complicated problems often need the more extensive follow-up of a public advocate's office or a community board, as was the case with Stetzer's playground on the Lower East Side.
The city's 59 community boards have seen 311 as a mixed blessing. Craig Hammerman of Brooklyn's Community Board Six says that 311 has freed up his resources by giving his constituents an effective way to handle most minor complaints.
"No citizen should have to call a community board to get a pothole fixed," he said.
But Hammerman and others also see major problems that 311 needs to address. In a survey of community board district managers taken last fall by the public advocate's office, 80 percent of respondents said the system needed to be improved (in pdf format). A large majority said 311 call takers lacked knowledge of city agencies, that the system failed to solve problems in a timely manner, and that the tracking system needed improvement. Only seven percent found the system's capability to follow up on complaints satisfactory.
But the community boards' real beef with 311 is that is has narrowed their view of the communities, because they are getting fewer calls themselves. The city is aggravating the situation, they say, by not sharing the information about complaints it's getting, leaving community boards without the information they need to do their jobs.
"We have to evaluate service delivery in our district; we have to make recommendations for renewals for [liquor] licenses and sidewalk cafes. How do we do this without knowing the number of complaints?" said Stetzer.
In response to these arguments, the City Council, through the Committee on Technology in Government, introduced legislation initially over Bloomberg's objections, that will require the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications to provide a monthly report online of complaints registered with 311, broken down by community boards. The law will take effect later this summer. Some community boards see the law as a step forward, but critics say that it will not provide the kind of detailed, up-to-date information that they need to do their jobs.
Menchini says that the law will provide not only community boards, but business improvement districts and private citizens, with information that will allow them to better participate in the problems of their communities.
"By making information available on the web, everybody gets to be a participant," he said. "Everybody gets to understand what's happening."
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When Lynn Parkerson, long-time dancer and choreographer, got married and moved from Manhattan to her husband’s home in Brooklyn Heights, she took a look around and said to herself, “why isn’t there a ballet company in Brooklyn?” Brooklyn Ballet was born.
As anybody in the arts will tell you, though, inspiration, talent, drive and even a ready-made audience are not enough. You need funding. Brooklyn Ballet, founded in 2002 and performing for free in Brooklyn schools and public parks, now has a budget of $60,000; the money has to come from somewhere.
That is why Parkerson was sitting with some 75 other heads of non-profit arts organizations at the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, attending the last of eight seminars the agency gave in all five boroughs on how to apply to it for funds. The arts administrators and artistic directors had just five days before the July 18th deadline for applications.
“For those of you who have never applied before,” Assistant Cultural Commissioner Kathleen Hughes was saying, “give a lot of thought as to whether this is the right time.”
Parkerson, who in fact had never applied before, wasn’t sure it was the right time. “I’d have to pay somebody $500 just to fill out this application,” she said privately, holding up a booklet of about 25 pages. “I don’t have any staff, I don’t have an office, there are so many things that have to get done in the course of a day – I have to go uptown to audition a dancer this afternoon. Doing the programming is a full-time job. Fundraising is a second full-time job.”
The city’s new $50.2 billion budget, which the mayor and the City Council passed on June 30th, and which officially took effect on July 1, includes some $130 million for the Department of Cultural Affairs to hand out to hundreds of non-profit arts groups this fiscal year. The Department of Cultural Affairs gives more money for the arts, officials there say, than any other government agency in the United States, including the National Endowment for the Arts.
The way they do it, however, doesn’t have everybody cheering. “It's inequitable, it's irrational, it doesn't satisfy anybody,” says Norma Munn, who has been following the city’s arts budget since she helped found the New York City Arts Coalition two decades ago. “The bulk of the organizations that get the money use it extremely well,” Munn adds. “But as a city policy, the way it’s distributed just doesn’t make much sense.”
“Let me give you a quick Arts Funding 101,” Assistant Commissioner Hughes was saying in the seminar.
“Last year, the agency’s budget was about $120 million, give or take,” she said. “Of that, about $100 million went to 34 organizations.”
1. These 34 are called the Cultural Institutions Group, or CIGs, and range from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which will get more than $22 million in the newly adopted budget, and the American Museum of Natural History, which will get about $17 million, to the Studio Museum in Harlem ($834,000) and the Staten Island Historical Society ($752,000).
The 34 CIGs are at the top of the heap in arts funding in New York City – guaranteed at least 80 percent of the department’s funding year after year.
2. The next level down are 175 arts organizations that are listed by name in the budget (this is called a “line-item” because year after year these same organizations get their own line in the budget). The Bronx Opera Company is slated to receive about $30,000 this year, although it is listed in the executive budget (in pdf format), as the Bronx Opera Society. (“We’ve never been the Bronx Opera Society, and never will be,” says artistic director Michael Spierman.) Among the other organizations with a line are the New Museum (which was promised $22,000 in the executive budget), the Tibetan Museum ($38,000), and the New York School for Circus Arts (almost $115,000). (Final figures for the line-items were not yet available in mid-July.)
While the organizations in this category receive less funding on average than those in the Cultural Institutions Group, there are some individual exceptions any given year. The Police Museum, for example, was listed in the executive budget this year at almost $800,000 (and last year got more than $900,000).
3. Below the line-item groups are those organizations chosen just for this year (with no guarantee of future funding) by an individual member of the City Council or a “council delegation” (meaning all the council members from a particular borough). These are called “member items”, and about 200 groups will get this money in any given year. (The list of these for this year will be available later this summer, officials say.)
Together, the arts organizations in these two categories – the “line items” and the “member items” – get about 90 percent of whatever funding is left after the Cultural Institutions Group. Last year, some 400 groups split about $18 million.
4. The money that remains is offered as part of something called the Cultural Development Fund. It is the only pool of money that the Department of Cultural Affairs awards competitively. The applications are reviewed by one of five peer panels (there is one for each borough), “made up of people like you,” Assistant Commissioner Hughes said at the seminar.
Last year, 550 groups applied to the Cultural Development Fund; 380 of them received a grant of at least $3,000 and at most $15,000. Together these 380 split about $1.8 million – less money than the Brooklyn Children’s Museum (a “CIG”) got all by itself.
It might seem like relatively little money, and the requirements for receiving it are rigorous and complicated (most of the two-and-a-half hour seminar was taken up with explaining how to fill out the application form). But to emerging arts groups, the money -- and the validation that comes with it ("It's the Goodhousekeeping Seal of Approval for the arts," Hughes jokes) -- couldn't be more important. "Every dollar makes a difference," said Monica Harte of The Remarkable Theater Brigade, which produces original musicals for an audience of special-needs children and is applying this year for the first time to the Cultural Development Fund (their first attempt at any government grant). “Three thousand dollars is nearly 14 percent of the budget for our next project -- substantial for us, and crucial to its success.”
To illustrate what’s wrong with this system, Norma Munn likes to tell the tale of the two Mets: While the Metropolitan Museum of Art (a “CIG”) is getting $22 million this year, the Metropolitan Opera (a “line item”) is slotted for only $134,000.
Those New Yorkers who love paintings more than opera could probably put together a case that the Met Museum deserves over 150 times more city funding than the Met Opera. But Munn’s point is that the criteria for this disparity are not spelled out. It cannot be the size of their respective budgets -- "the Metropolitan Opera actually has a budget that's a little bit larger than the Met Museum" -- and it is not artistic merit: Both are highly regarded.
If the reason for the difference is popularity, then why has the Department of Cultural Affairs given the Police Museum some seven times more funding over the past two years than it has given the New York Philharmonic, and why was the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, which draws an audience of about 8,000 theatergoers a week, being promised about $17,000 in the executive budget, while the Bronx County Historical Society, which has an attendance of about 8,000 for the entire year, is getting more than $200,000? “It’s not as if the Vivian Beaumont doesn’t need the money,” Munn says. “It most certainly does.”
One reason the Bronx Historical Society gets more money is because it is one of the 34 CIGs.
Being a CIG certainly helps an organization's finances. But what determines whether a non-profit group gets to be a CIG? The arrangement might make sense if the 34 members of the Cultural Institutions Group were the biggest or most important or the most obviously worthy from an artistic point of view – or even if there were some other clear-cut criteria for their selection, such as most needy. But how do you explain the inclusion in the Cultural Institutions Group, for example, of the Bronx Historical Society and the Staten Island Historical Society, but the exclusion of the Queens Historical Society, the Brooklyn Historical Society and the New-York Historical Society? How to explain the inclusion of the Queens Museum of Art and the Museum of the Moving Image, but the exclusion of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney?
“It’s a lesson in politics” is how Norma Munn explains it. “The Bronx Historical Society is a CIG and the Queens Historical Society is not, because somebody 25 years ago was smart enough in the Bronx to lobby, and somebody in Queens was not.”
The official explanation is that the 34 members of the Cultural Institutions Group are “owned by the city” (meaning the city legally owns the buildings and the property underneath them) -- though, actually, one of them (the Studio Museum in Harlem) isn’t. The bulk of the money from the city for the CIGs is for “operating and energy support” (heat and light and building maintenance costs) which private donors typically find insufficiently sexy to fund. In exchange, according to Janet Schneider, the executive director of the Cultural Institutions Group, the 34 CIGs have “detailed operating agreements” with the city that require various obligations (different for each institution) that non-CIGs don’t have. “These may entail providing free admission to NYC school children, free or pay-what-you-wish admission, and other free services,” she says.
Critics see the 34 CIGs as largely governed identically to the other major non-profit institutions in New York -- decisions made by independent boards of directors; revenue produced by admission charges or ticket prices, corporate sponsorships, individual memberships and donations; etc. -- and therefore question what "owned by the city" really means.
The rationale for much of the funding for the arts in general, they say, is hidden in history, some of it the result of long-ago horse-trading by long-dead borough-based public officials in a now-defunct city institution (the Board of Estimate).
“The system was built up, ad hoc, over decades,” says Norma Munn, who has been railing for years about it on behalf of her coalition, which represents more than 200 non-profit arts organizations in the city. (See her Funds for the Arts Go Up, But Remain Unfair written in 2000.)
Schneider of the Cultural Institutions Group sees it differently, at least as it relates to the CIGs. The relationship between New York City and the cultural institutions it owns dates back to the 1870s, she points out, a “public/private partnership model” that was needed to create such undisputed treasures as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. Over the years, she says, the system “has responded to changing needs and changing times...That the city has not abrogated its commitment to the institutions over a period of 130 years is a further testimony to the success of this relationship as arts policy."
Shortly after Kate Levin became the commissioner of Cultural Affairs in 2002, she acknowledged the flaws in the arts budget process at a symposium, co-sponsored by the Alliance for the Arts, an advocacy and research organization.
While she emphasized she was in no way “devaluing the enormous contributions” made by the members of the Cultural Institutions Group, she said “it’s extremely awkward to have a cultural funder that has so little flexibility in terms of responding to emerging needs, emerging institutions, emerging aesthetic trends, etc.”
As for the “line-item” organizations – again with a caveat about the worthiness of many institutions – she said “I was shocked to find that there’s a sizable portion of line-itemed organizations that have gone out of business, and yet their funds appear year after year, and they can’t really be reallocated.”
Since then, Commissioner Levin says now through a spokeswoman, she has been able to reallocate the money from the defunct groups (which were not as numerous as she had thought), and become more responsive to a wide range of cultural organizations especially through the capital budget, which funds major projects such as building renovations and the purchase of vehicles. The new capital budget (in pdf format) will provide more than $800 million over the next four years to help fund such projects for 161 of the city’s cultural organizations, up from 84 in 2002. (Examples: $29 million for Lincoln Center, $1.6 million for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, $87,000 for the Louis Armstrong House, $25,000 for P.S. 122 Theater in the Bronx.) "The agency is always looking at ways to make money more available to groups, and to respond to emerging needs."
If the expense budget remains far less flexible, even Norma Munn concedes that it would be difficult to change it. “To fix the system would require either taking money away from institutions that are getting it now, which would be politically unfeasible,” Munn says, “or increasing the total amount of money available for the arts, which the mayor is not likely to do.”
The mayor has increased the total amount of money available for the arts – from his own pocket. For the fourth year in a row, he has given an “anonymous” gift (reported in every local newspaper) to the Carnegie Foundation of New York – the accumulative amount is $55 million -- to distribute grants to a list of hundreds of groups in the five boroughs, including about 230 arts and cultural institutions.
As for the total amount of money available for the arts from the city government that he heads, the adopted budget -- as predicted(see section entitled "The Budget Ballet"), and despite the huzzahs over City Council-backed "restorations" -- includes about one quarter of one percent for the arts, just about the same percentage as ten years ago under then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
In a city that is the capital of culture – and the capital of capital -- money for the arts does not just come from the government, as officials at the Department of Cultural Affairs are the first to point out.
"Who Pays For The Arts?", a study in 2001 by the Alliance for the Arts of 575 organizations that applied for funding from the Department of Cultural Affairs, found that on average, their revenue sources were
A reason for the relatively small percentage of revenue from government grants, the report observes, is simply that the government has been cutting back -- though, the report concludes, that money is not being replaced (as was the hope and the prediction) by an increase in corporate donations.
“Government” does not mean just the Department of Cultural Affairs. Funds for the arts are available from federal agencies (National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, etc.), state agencies ( the New York State Council on the Arts, New York State Natural Heritage Trust, New York State Department of Education, etc.), and other city agencies, such as the Department of Youth and Community Development and the Department of Education. While the Department of Cultural Affairs will only fund arts organizations that have been around for at least two years, there are five borough arts councils that are open to groups with less of a track record.
But the most helpful advice (and most revealing comment?) during the funding seminar at the Department of Cultural Affairs may have come when the assistant commissioner was explaining that this year’s cultural budget includes $8 million of “member items” – picked by individual members of the City Council.
“The council members have the ability to fund your organization -– if they know of your organization,” she told the group, as she handed out a contact list of the council. “One of the things you need to do is reach out to those council members.”
That is one of the first things Lynn Parkerson did, after she put together a board of directors and got non-profit status for Brooklyn Ballet. On the recommendation of a fundraising consultant, she was able to wrangle some of her first funding from the council.
She did this by meeting with the council member from her district, David Yassky, who invited her to be one of the many beseeching groups to give a five-minute presentation at the next meeting of the Brooklyn delegation. This is where she won over Lew Fidler, who arranged funding (not through Cultural Affairs but a different agency) so that she could offer a ballet program in six schools in his district.
What won him over?
“I brought two dancers along, and we gave a real performance,” Lynn Parkerson said. She discovered early, then, how much arts funding in New York depends on a political dance.
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