411 is a headache for Upper Marlboro municipality

Many callers directed to town offices are actually seeking county services

The calls come from county residents who got the phone number for town hall by dialing 411, an information line, officials said. Callers’ questions range from animal control issues to whether they must put fire extinguishers in their building.

‘‘There’s really nothing wrong with getting a few calls over the course of the day. We expect to get calls from the community we represent,” town clerk M. David Williams said. ‘‘But when it comes to a dozen from people not in our jurisdiction, then it’s an interruption.”

Some days the town gets only a few misdirected phone calls, but other days the stream is constant, said Williams, who along with the town administrator answers most calls. The mix-up has been going on for at least a year.

Town hall houses the municipal government that provides services of public works and public safety for the town of Upper Marlboro’s 670 residents. The town covers four-tenths of a square mile.

Commissioner Joseph Hourclé said, ‘‘If you’re trying to write a report and somebody’s calling every half hour, I can see how it might get frustrating.”

Many phone carriers nationwide operate the 411 information line. Typically, a caller says what they need and either an automated system or a live operator takes keywords from the caller’s request and uses them to pull up a list of corresponding phone numbers from a computer program.

‘‘It’s like a shortcut language they use,” said Jim Smith, a spokesman for Verizon. ‘‘Live operators use codes to reflect what the person is asking for. Up comes a series of numbers and the computer says this looks like the right one.”

While Verizon does not handle every 411 call that ends up with Upper Marlboro, the phone company has a large presence in the county.

Smith said he has heard of this problem happening in other areas.

Town officials, who have tried many times to get the problem corrected, said there could be a few reasons why 411 operators refer some callers to the town instead of the county.

‘‘There are a lot of problems with people assuming that the town of Upper Marlboro’s government is part of the county government,” Hourclé said.

Hourclé, a computer programmer who does data archiving for NASA, said some keywords in the 411 program – such as the word ‘‘courthouse” – might be wrongly associated with the town, or operators might be interpreting peoples’ requests wrong.

‘‘A lot of time it’s not the people’s fault, they just don’t understand the difference,” Hourclé said.

Another problem comes from postal codes, town commissioner Steve Sonnett said. While the town of Upper Marlboro has about 670 residents, the greater Upper Marlboro area has about 20,000, some of whom call town hall with questions the county should answer.

‘‘We have a lot of people who think they live in the town of Upper Marlboro,” Sonnett said.

Smith said Verizon’s 411 system has Upper Marlboro phone numbers separate from county ones, so it is not likely that his company’s operators are confusing the two.

‘‘It has to be an issue of inputs from customers,” Smith said. ‘‘They think they know what they want, and it’s not what they want.”

Williams said that whatever the problem is, he and others at town hall try to send callers in the right direction. He keeps a list of county phone numbers on the wall near his desk.

And the slipup with 411 often frustrates callers as much as it does town officials, Williams said.

‘‘There are a lot of discontented people who end up with this phone number,” he said.