Mayor Ed Lee has an answer for the jammed-up phone lines at the 911 call center in San Francisco.

The City’s overwhelmed 911 dispatchers will no longer handle the 3,000 non-emergency auto-burglary calls that clog the system on an average month, the San Francisco Examiner has learned. Unless a car break-in is underway, dispatchers will transfer the calls to 311.

Since the dispatchers started redirecting the calls Aug. 10, the 911 center has come closer to meeting the national standard for answering 90 percent of emergency calls within 10 seconds.

“It’s going to get better and better because I don’t think we diverted all 3,000 calls,” the mayor told the Examiner. “I think this is just the first batch. When we get to diverting all those calls, you’re going to see even more dramatic [results].”

SEE RELATED: SF dispatchers call attention to ‘crisis’ at 911 center

SEE RELATED: Mayor Lee vows to solve 911 response failures in two months

SEE RELATED: SF short 911 call-takers during massive power outage in April

The call center answered 80 percent of calls within 10 seconds as of Aug. 17, a 3 percent increase over the week prior and up from 66 percent in April, according to the Department of Emergency Management.

The mayor is responding to pressure to fix the broken 911 system in San Francisco, which has for years failed to meet the national standard for answering calls because of short-staffing and a spike in call volume. Meanwhile, overwhelmed dispatchers are burdened with extra work to meet the demand.

“The call volume increased about 10 percent over the last year,” said DEM Deputy Director Robert Smuts. “It was a challenge getting ahead of it but I think we are seeing that happen over the last months.”

On May 9, Lee told reporters he wanted the problem fixed within two months. But the mayor declined to say in an interview last Thursday when the department would meet the national standard.

Lee said he would have a projection in 30 to 45 days, after 911 begins to divert homeless-related non-emergency calls to 311. About 4,000 of the 50,000 non-emergency calls to the call center each month are related to homelessness, Smuts said.

Lee said he still has confidence in DEM Executive Director Anne Kronenberg despite the problem boiling to the surface as call volumes increased beginning in 2011 and retirements fluctuated in 2013.

“She’s helping to lead the effort here, too,” the mayor said. “I’m just trying to figure it out now. Later on, I can always talk about what do we do in the long run … If I see a way forward to get better, I don’t begin by bashing people. I begin by saying, ‘Is this the problem?’ Let’s solve it then, and let’s all do it better.”

The mayor said he came up with the idea to divert calls while looking at the data for the call center and realizing that “we weren’t moving fast enough on training new additional staff.”

Burt Wilson, chapter president for the dispatchers with SEIU Local 1021, said diverting calls will help out the call center, but disputed the origin of the idea. Wilson said the union has discussed diverting non-emergency calls since he became president in 2015.

Wilson said dispatchers spend minutes asking non-emergency callers a series of questions before transferring them to dispatchers assigned to non-emergency calls, who then transfer the callers to 311 about 90 percent of the time.

“It works, it will help out the stats,” Wilson said. “Instead of spending two or three minutes asking the questions and then transferring to non-emergency and then eventually transferring to 311, you’re saving a lot of time there.”

Diverting calls is just one effort underway to solve the problem, as the call center appears to lose dispatchers to retirement and burnout as quickly as it can train them.

The department has 52 dispatchers in training and expects to graduate a first class of 10 call-takers in late September. As of June, the department had 123 dispatchers.

“We’re down to like a 100 dispatchers right now,” Wilson said. “They cannot retain the veteran dispatchers.”

The department is preparing to launch a public education campaign to teach people to use 911 for emergencies and 311 for non-emergencies. The department is also training three police officers and one firefighter to work at the call center.

As for the 311 call center, the mayor beefed up their budget to include five more positions to help with the anticipated increase in call volume. 311 now has an option in its call menu for reporting non-emergency auto burglaries.

“Everything is always catching up,” Lee said. “Immediately, their wait times are going to take a little longer, because they’re trying to figure out the best ways to answer people and to get them.”

Ben Sizemore, an SEIU Local 1021 field representative who works with the 311 customer service representatives, said diverting calls could be a “win-win” for 911, 311 and the public.

“They’ll get a little bit of faster service because the 311 folks, they’re trained to take these police reports over the phone,” Sizemore said.

However, Sizemore said 311 administrators are “nervous about how much” the call volume will increase. “We just don’t really know right now,” he said.

Sizemore also works with 911 dispatchers.

“This ought to help some, but this is not going to solve the call problem at 911,” Sizemore said.

The dispatchers union is calling on the mayor to help them become classified as public safety workers rather than clerks. The reclassification would allow dispatchers, who save lives by giving direction over the phone, to retire at a younger age.

“Do that and take the credit on that,” Wilson said. “I’ll praise him up and down.”

Click here or scroll down to comment