365 Days Of 311 In Worcester: Lessons Learned, Expansion Planned

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“It’s been a learning experience,” Director of Emergency Communications and Emergency Management Charles Goodwin said.

Not necessarily in a bad way, he said. Over the past year, the city has received just under 5,000 311 requests. Those range from people calling from the courthouse looking for help with bail, to potholes and illegal dumping.

311 has plenty of room to grow. The city’s 911 system receives just under 200,000 calls per year, Goodwin said. Between July and December last year, 311 averaged between nine and 10 contacts per day. But those figures ballooned in 2024, with requests now coming at a rate of about 30 per day, Goodwin said — that’s up to 1,000 requests per month.

Worcester is also expanding the system, including an integration with Facebook Messenger, email and a chat feature on the city’s website that uses an AI virtual agent to field questions in English and Spanish.

A bigger expansion is coming later this month when the city reopens the Main South municipal service center as a 311 outpost. The center will have three 311 agents working different hours than the 311 hotline (7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.), including two days a week until 7 p.m. Residents will be able to walk in and file a work order, get birth and death certificates, apply for passports, get information about Department of Transitional Services offerings — it’ll even have the city’s first vending machine that sells Worcester’s yellow pay-as-you-throw trash bags.

The entire 311 package has been an ambitious effort on behalf of city government, offering the promise of solutions to the most local problems. 311 is a clearinghouse for complaints, but 311 itself doesn’t come and fix things — that’s still the responsibility of city workers across multiple departments, from police to inspectional services to parks. You complain, the complaint goes to the appropriate department, and then they fix it. That chain can be interrupted for any number of reasons, and that’s also why some users might end up frustrated by it.

In January, residents from Balis Avenue went to a city council meeting to talk about problems they were having with 311. Their road frequently gets inundated with debris from a nearby private road, they said, and for years the residents just called the city to come clean it up. But with 311 in place, their complaints were being closed on the SeeClickFix app without any resolution.

Goodwin said the department is working on the closed-ticket issue. One problem is that the 311 calls and app complaints are not integrated. So if someone makes a complaint on the app and someone else calls about it, 311 might close the app complaint, but keep the phone complaint open. 311 agents have in recent months started calling residents to personally follow up on complaints. He’s also working with various city departments so that those on-the-ground workers add responses in the app.

“The app itself is meant to provide efficiency, transparency and convenience to residents. Our back-end applications should be working together to automate and streamline our processes to handle requests,” City Manager Eric Batista said in a statement after the Balis Avenue council meeting.

Setting aside closed tickets, residents may see delays in getting problems fixed for a variety of reasons. Complaints that deal with problems on state property, for example, have to be fixed by the state, and Worcester can’t necessarily boss around MassDOT or DCR. In other cases, like with potholes, the city might have to work with Eversource or National Grid to move a utility line. Ordering materials takes time, and even changing seasons can mess up a relatively simple reuqest.

At the beginning of April, this reporter’s wife began a hilarious 311 quest to get a flat-screen TV dumped along Catherine Street removed. The TV was partially covered in snow when she first reported it, but as spring wore on — and no one came to collect it — plants started growing over the mess of smashed plastic and capacitors. Her tickets kept getting closed because city workers couldn’t find the TV hidden behind weeds. It took until early June and the advocacy of city councilors Etel Haxhiaj, Jenny Pacillo and Candy Mero-Carlson before someone came and got it.

(My wife has had some success, too: An abandoned garage along Eastern Avenue that looked like it was melting onto the sidewalk was recently fixed after several 311 complaints; ditto for a car with its wheels removed that was sticking out onto the street.)

In other cases, you might run up against a city department that, for whatever reason, won’t fix the problem.

At the beginning of September, this reporter began submitting 311 complaints about an abandoned car near my home in the Bell Hill area. The car had flat tires, a popped hood and trunk, and had been sitting in the same spot for what felt like months. Scores of 311 complaints about it were closed without a resolution. The city said the car was registered, so there was nothing they could do about it. Then they said the car was on private property, so there was nothing they could do about it. The car was actually parked at the end of Rodney Street on city-owned property that’s part of Green Hill Park. The car was towed in mid-March after I provided an image of the city assessor map showing the car was on public property.

One new feature 311 has added may help at least open up communication between residents and city departments to make the process smoother. The app now has a feature that allows residents to report problems anonymously, but also provide a phone number and email address so 311 employees can follow up.

As of July 11 — the exact one-year anniversary of the app — 311 had received 4,997 different tickets and 3,624 had been closed in some way. There are some complaints that are harder to solve, Goodwin said, like moment-in-time issues like fireworks or illegal parking. The 311 center is integrated with 911, so people who call can often get patched over to police help, even for non-emergency issues.

For the future, Goodwin sees huge potential for 311, and growth. With every call and SeeClickFix request, the city learns how to respond better, more quickly and more satisfactorily, he said.

“We want to ensure that, either way, we can address an issue you’ve got, even if it isn’t 311-related,” he said. “At the end of the day, we’re here if you don’t know who to call.”

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