Pacific Palisades Community Council Hosts MyLA311 Presentation

By SARAH SHMERLING | Editor-in-Chief

Pacific Palisades Community Council hosted a presentation by MyLA311 Director Donna Arrechea at its Thursday, March 9, meeting—diving into the program’s history, as well as how the community can access and use it.

“Our 311 call center actually is on its 21st year,” Arrechea explained. “It was established in 2002 as a call center using the three-digit number ‘311,’ which was set aside by the federal government. Just like 911 is for emergency services, 311 was set aside for non-emergency governmental services.”

The number is used in “many cities and counties” throughout the U.S. and Canada, Arrechea explained. MyLA311—which is designed to put “the power of City Hall in the palm of your hand,” according to Arrechea’s presentation—offers services through three outlets: a mobile application, a web portal and a contact center.

The mobile application, which is available for free for iPhone and Android, is available in English, Spanish, Korean, Armenian and Chinese. The application, first launched in 2013, allows for city service request intake, including trash, dumping, graffiti, potholes and street lighting. Users are also able to access a city services directory, social media feeds, pay bills and see city info.

“It has a couple of main functions,” Arrechea shared, “and that is, it has a knowledge base where we have information about over 1,500 different city services and programs and information that you can search … [and] also for service request intake, as I’m sure you’re all aware, because you want to report things in the neighborhood that are problems that the city is responsible for.”

The web portal is available via myla311.lacity.org, and the contact center can be reached by calling 311 in the city of LA or 213-473-3231. It is open Monday to Friday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., as well as weekends/holidays from 8 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. The center may be reached via email at 311@lacity.org.

Several types of service requests can be made through MyLA311, including LA City Sanitation (trash collection, bulky item pick-up, dumping, homeless encampments, etc.); Streets LA (roadways, sidewalks, alleys, potholes, city tree issues, obstructions in the sidewalk, etc.); Bureau of Street Lighting; Office of Community Beautification (which handles graffiti); Recreation and Parks; Animal Services (pet adoptions, lost pets, violations and barking dog reports); and LADOT – Transportation (eScooters and taxi complaints, with more services slated to come soon, including problems with traffic signals and signs, as well as illegal parking).

Arrechea presented “important tips” for how to use MyLA311, including to provide an email address in order to receive emails when the service request opens and closes.

“Not every [service request] can be completed in a few days—some need a lot of time or funding, some are not city responsibility, some can’t be done due to inaccurate location and lack of contact information to get more info,” according to the presentation. “If [the] problem is not resolved within reasonable time, consider calling or looking up status using the [service request] number or providing contact information.”

Arrechea shared that one of the common complaints about the system is that a ticket gets closed and the email does not have comments on why.

“There’s a variety of reasons for that,” she explained. “Some of them are human error by the departments who are closing the tickets … [and] some issues that get reported to us actually need to be referred to other departments or other agencies.”

When it comes to describing the location of a request, a description/details can be “extremely important” if the problem is not directly in front of an address.

Arrechea explained that during recent storms, 311 received more than 3,000 requests for downed trees or large broken limbs in a three-day period. During a more typical time, things like graffiti and potholes can be repaired within a few days.

“However, street lights, as an example, currently are taking two to three weeks to get a single street light repaired,” Arrechea explained. “If it’s a wire theft issue, with multiple street lights out, it can actually take a few months to get repaired.”

Sidewalk repairs, which is one of the things the city has “limited funding” for, has a waitlist of about seven years, Arrechea said. Those that are in “bad shape” are being prioritized.

The city of LA recently completed a weeklong campaign leading up to National 311 Day, which took place on Saturday, March 11, encouraging residents to increase their use of the system to make requests. During the week of March 6 to 10, more than 26,500 requests were made, according to data shared by the city.

“If you care about your community, you are the eyes and ears for the city,” Arrechea said. “We depend on you, that if you see problems, you report them to us so that we’re aware … we really do depend on constituents to report those issues.”