Is there a VIP hotline to get your potholes fixed?

City Controller Alan Butkovitz put out a press release last week saying that, while going about his business as the city's fiscal watchdog, he'd discovered a "VIP hotline call center," a backdoor way for the politically connected to get potholes and streetlights fixed without having to call Philly311 like the rest of the plebes.

And not only that, it was expensive — the six city employees who worked in the office on the seventh floor of City Hall earned a total of $164,000 in overtime pay last year.

"The primary goal of implementing Philly311 was to cease the historical use of an exclusive City Hall hotline for the well-connected," wrote Butkovitz in the release. "Philly311 is supposed to be the VIP line for everybody, not just for those who know somebody in City Hall."

Eliminating this sort of VIP access to city government has been the distinguishing goal of Mayor Michael Nutter's administration, and Philly311 probably his most visible related project. Claiming that there's a VIP back door to Philly311, then, is a pretty serious burn.

We're in the opening "everybody into the pool!" weeks of the 2015 mayoral race, and the names of both Butkovitz and city Managing Director Rich Negrin, whose offices launched and oversee Philly311, have been tossed around as possible candidates. The timing seemed less than coincidental. So City Paper looked into it. Is there actually a super-secret hotline for VIPs?

Philadelphia was one of the last big U.S. cities to get a central city-services hotline when Philly311 debuted on the last day of 2008. Before that, if you had official questions or wanted the city to deal with something that wasn't an emergency — a broken traffic light, pothole, persistent weird smell, structurally unsound building, red-tape snarl, etc. — you had to navigate City Hall yourself or ask a favor of somebody with political clout.

"You called your community leader, your city leaders, your local CDC, your councilperson," says Negrin. "Or you would try to figure out for yourself: 'Hey, is that Streets? Is that L&I? Who is that?' That's changed," he says. Questions that come in via the 215-686-8686 hotline, website, mobile app, social media and walk-ins to Philly311's offices on the ground floor of City Hall are now answered by staffers 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. weekdays, and 24 hours a day during emergencies.

"It's not just providing good customer service and modernizing what we do — it's also about having one of the most ethical governments in the recent history of Philadelphia, where you don't have to play an insider game to get things done," says Negrin.

Butkovitz says his discovery contradicts that high-minded claim — in reality, the rabble get stuck with a semi-functional Philly311, while those in the know can get their problems heard 24/7. "The mayor said that having access — that certain people having knowledge or having inside connections to get services — he said that was wrong," he says. "He said that when he set up 311, he was going to abolish special access, and he didn't."

Butkovitz has long argued that Philly311 is expensive, inefficient and "a PR stunt;" his Controller's Office's 2011 report saying so was addressed to Negrin. In 2012, Butkovitz told a neighborhood meeting that Philly311 "just doesn't work;" an aide then suggested that neighbors call Butkovitz's office instead.

Butkovitz says his auditors made their discovery while investigating overtime expenses. "They discovered this unit that was previously not well known, and there was interrogation about its mission and what it does, and there was a lot of vagueness and fencing, and then ... more of the real purpose of the operation was revealed."

A frustrated-sounding Negrin says Butkovitz has misunderstood or is mischaracterizing the "real purpose" of a seventh-floor office called Unified Dispatch, known for decades as Municipal Radio. Negrin says that Dispatch is staffed 24 hours a day. But he says it's completely unrelated to Philly311 — Dispatch is a City Hall phone tree, and he'd have been happy to fill Butkovitz in about it if he'd bothered to call and ask.

"Say there's a building collapse, a major five-alarm fire, something that requires all hands on deck," says Negrin, who says he's been awakened in the middle of the night by Dispatch more than a few times. If you're a city employee who sees an unfolding emergency, but doesn't know how to get the mayor out of bed, Dispatch "can help you contact folks you need to contact in order to make important decisions. It's not a service line the way [Butkovitz is] trying to paint it out to be."

It's ridiculous to imply that just anybody who's well-connected can "have them call me at 2 a.m. and wake me up. It's just not common sense," says Negrin. Butkovitz, Negrin says, is "clearly confused, and could have clarified any confusion by simply picking up the phone. ... Instead, he communicates through a press release that makes allegations against city employees who do a job it's tough to get anybody to do — work late-night shifts to ensure that we have access to each other — and calls them some kind of inappropriate hotline using public dollars to serve the few."

On the phone, Butkovitz says he isn't confused. "We have identified a secret call center that handles exactly the routine kind of problems helped by 311. And all I can give you are those facts."

But Butkovitz is unable to share the facts that lead him to connect the dots between "overtime" and "secret VIP call center." When pressed, he says, "We have reason to believe this; we've conducted interviews, we have information. We cannot disclose the identities of everyone from whom the information came, but we stand by our report."

This overtime report hasn't been released yet, and Butkovitz declines to give even general examples from it. When will the report come out? "Sometime in the future." Weeks, or months? "We'll put out a media advisory." Why notify the press and the mayor of his findings before he could share anything from the report?

"Instead of sending a secret letter and having a backdoor meeting with [Nutter], I made the letter available to the media and to the public. So now we're having a public conversation about it, and I think that's the way government is supposed to work.

"Now you're saying that the quality of the information that we have — you'd like it to be more detailed. I'd like it to be more detailed," he continues. "But I think it's perfectly acceptable for me to reveal to the people of Philadelphia what we have discovered on this issue."

Lacking details from Butkovitz, City Paper got hold of the alleged "VIP hotline" number and started poking around. Online, it's listed mostly for reporting emergency situations after hours — the Philadelphia Department of Public Health lists it as the number for doctors to report cases of infectious disease after hours, and it's on the city-published "Citywide Emergency Action Plan and Response Training," "City Wide Bomb Threat Procedures" and "Summary of Chemical Warfare Agents."

However, the number does turn up in a few suspicious places — state Rep. Dwight Evans' website lists it for "broken traffic light." "Numbers to know courtesy [Councilman] Curtis Jones Jr.," found on the Manayunk Neighborhood Council's website, lists it for reporting "foul odor (on weekend)." And the Packer Park Civic Group lists it for "abandoned auto report, evening hotline."

CP's call to the number around 1 a.m. on a weeknight was picked up immediately, before the end of the first ring. "Dispatch," said a male voice. This reporter identified herself as such, and asked if this was the right number to report a broken traffic light or an abandoned car. The man said no — you could report those things on the 311 website, or, if it was an emergency, you could call 911. He declined to answer questions about his job, seeming anxious about tying up the line.

So, is it efficient to have people working overtime as a phone tree? Might it make sense to staff Philly311 24 hours a day instead? Those are valid questions. But is there a central VIP hotline? Minus actual evidence from Butkovitz, we'd have to say no.