By Staff

March 25, 2014

BURLINGTON, ON

You will soon no longer have to call your council member to complain about pot holes on your street.

The city is currently testing a software application that will be on the city’s web site that will allow you to report a pot hole, get a confirmation that the report was received and then get a notice telling you the pot hole has been fixed.

AND you will be able to go to a map and see all the pot hole reports that have been submitted and what their status is. That should be a very busy map.

Deb Caughlin, E-GOV project manager sat before the city’s Development and Infrastructure committee and explained how this website application (they call it a widget) was going to work – and then made the mistake of trying to go live on-line and show council members how cool this was.

The demo had clearly not been fully tested – it didn’t work but Caughlin assured council that the thing did work – it was currently in the testing phase.

Burlington has made a significant commitment to pushing as much as possible in the way of city hall interaction on-line. It is easier for the public and requires next to nothing in terms of day-to-day staff time. The initiative is one the city bought – $16,000 for the initial year – less for following years.

The service can be modified to be used to report sign problems, street lights and traffic lights.

What if a bunch of high school students decide they want to flood the system with prank reports – the system is designed to spot when excessive traffic is coming from a single computer – which will make it difficult for that senior who has nothing better to do than pester city hall while they do their civic thing.

There will be glitches – but it’s a neat idea. Right now you can go to the graphic on the home page of the city website – click on the image and you get taken to the widget.

At this point all you can do is report a pot hole. Staff expects to have the testing and staff training done by the end of the first week in April and go live shortly after that.

You are asked for an email address – if you don’t give one – you can’t get a notice that the pot hole has been fixed.

We will let you know when the service is fully operational – meanwhile you can report pot holes now.

The service is being built to operate on Smart Phones as well. The service SEE, CLICK,FIX is being used in city’s across North America. If you are in a city that has the service you will be able to report pot holes there as well. We can’t wait to learn that Hamilton is using the service. Mains Street west is brutal.