Cleveland Made a Multi-Million Dollar Push to Modernize 311 Service. Now More People Using It

City Hall spent $2.1 million upgrading and advertising its 311 service this year. Credit: Mark Oprea

Fix a pothole. Repair a cemetery headstone. Clean up broken glass in the street. Sweep up sidewalk trash. Restore downed traffic lights.

Did you know the city will do this, and 47 other tasks, for you if you ask them?

And it’s all improving after long overdue attention this year.

City Hall has allocated $4 million to not only modernize Cleveland’s 311 system, in its first major upgrade to the service that since 2009 had run solely on phone calls, emails and even snail mail, but to advertise the service so residents will actually use it.

In September, Cleveland’s Department of Urban Innovation & Analytics debuted a new web portal and an accompanying $696,595 ad campaign that has included billboards, swag and stickers, to better connect pothole and overflowing trash bin complaints with the clean-up crews tasked with remedying them.

Which begs the question: Was the $2 million spent so far on the upgrade and ads worth it?

Elizabeth Crowe, the head of Urban Innovation and lead on the 311 upgrade, said yes. Twenty to 30 percent of all 311 requests in the past two months, she said, have been routed first through the online portal.

“I would say we’re doing really well,” Crowe told Scene. “Our call volumes have been really steady.”

According to Cleveland’s Open Data Portal, Crowe is right in historical terms. After a summertime peak, 311 requests reached 5,530 in September—the month the site debuted—yet dropped to 4,935 in October.

That drop in calls is normal for fall-time City Hall, and it’s much lower than 2023 numbers, where October requests were almost 1,000 calls fewer than last month.

A general spike Crowe ascribes to the city’s first-ever 311 marketing campaign, where billboards and bus station ads reminded Clevelanders they could get potholes fixed or dead animals picked up.

Scene tried out the new system, and filed, around noon on November 22, a request to clean up trash and debris in Perk Plaza. The request was still “open” as of Tuesday afternoon; no email confirmations or “pending” notices were sent either. (Most requests take at most 10 days to complete, the portal says.)

But Crowe argued that the efficiency of the upgrade lied in the modern way requests are now sorted, by forwarding 311 asks—like Scene’s trash pick-up—directly to the right departments and employees.

“Each form goes directly to the foreman of the crew that manages the work or the chief building inspector, if it’s Building & Housing, who’s specifically responsible for doing that work,” she said. “It goes from our 311 system right into their work order management system.”

Broken glass on sidewalks or fallen branches downtown head straight, she said, to Downtown Cleveland, Inc.’s Ambassadors. Grass cutting to maintenance workers. Overflowing trash bins to clean-up crews in Ohio City. And so on.

Crowe said that she envisions at least a part of the remaining $2.1 million being spent on developing an 311 app, like New York City and Boston have, to make it even easier for Clevelanders to send requests.

Yet, a lot of 311’s effectiveness will show over the next half year or so, as the new website proves its worth for the incoming Department of Innovation & Technology, which will assume Crowe’s department next year. As 311, as Crowe admitted, doesn’t work if Clevelanders don’t have faith in its efficacy.

Or that it exists in the first place.

“‘I didn’t realize we did all this in the first place.’ That’s been a big hole for us at City Hall,” Crowe said.

“And we’re just saying to our residents: ‘Call us for this stuff,’” she added. “Tell us there’s a dead animal. Call us. Go online. But just tell us.”

Subscribe to Cleveland Scene newsletters.