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Althea Bernheim, director of the Jersey City Resident Response Center, is celebrating the release of a new app, Jersey City Connect, that will act as a mobile 311 service for residents. Reena Rose Sibayan | The Jersey Journal

(Jersey Journal file photo)

JERSEY CITY -- Jersey City residents who spot a pothole or see a broken traffic light will now be able to report them to the city as easily as they can post on Facebook or send a Snapchat.

The Resident Response Center, the city's go-to department for all resident complaints, is launching a new app created by SeeClickFix that drags more of the city's often-outmoded bureaucracy into the 21st Century.

Jersey City has debuted a new app, Jersey City Connect, that gives users an easy way to report problems, from potholes to downed wires to garbage in the street.

City officials hope the app, called Jersey City Connect, will provide residents with an easier way to lodge complaints while giving the city a better sense of overarching problems that need to be attacked with new policies or legislation.

The move comes as cities nationwide seek ways to connect to residents more likely to use an app on their smartphones than to call the City Hall operator.

Althea Bernheim, director of the RRC, formerly the Mayor's Action Bureau, told The Jersey Journal the city decided to spend the first few years of Mayor Steve Fulop's administration working with a mobile reporting system that had already been in place, so they could determine what worked, what didn't and what features a new system would need.

The older app, Bernheim said, wasn't as "people friendly." Jersey City Connect, available for download now, allows users to log complaints, see and track city officials' responses and review responses to other users' problems. A map feature allows everyone to see at once where most users are reporting potholes, downed wires, garbage in the street -- you name it.

"The big thing here is data capture," she said. "It really tells us what's going on and what's needed."

RRC's office hours will remain the same for people who prefer to call problems in, she added.

As the popularity of smartphones has skyrocketed -- 72 percent of people in the United States own one, up from 35 percent in 2011 -- cities have invested in their own mobile apps or partnered with tech companies to produce them. Boston in 2009 launched an app designed to let residents report problems like potholes or graffiti. Los Angeles and Denver have partnered with Xerox to create an app that uses data about traffic, nearby Lyft drivers and even open parking spaces to let users navigate those cities.

Jersey City Connect will cost the city about $14,000 a year, below the threshold that requires the contract to be put out to bid and less expensive than the old system, according to Bernheim.

Philip Mark Plotch, who teaches political science at Saint Peter's University and heads the school's master of public administration program, lauds the app, saying the ability for users to track the city's response to their own and others' complaints "really adds much more accountability to city government."

Stephen Larrick, open data project lead for the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates transparency in government, said apps like Jersey City Connect can fundamentally change the relationship between government and its citizens.

"It's a promise in which the role that we play as the public is not just a point in time, at a public hearing or council meeting with a specific moment of public participation, but where that's a more continuous process, where power is shared throughout the community," Larrick said.

Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.