Town Asks Residents To Submit Complaints through Website
- Philip Thibodeau
- 28 minutes ago
- 4 min read
One of the most prominent features on the town of Southington’s new website is a feedback button designed to make it a quicker and easier for the town to address resident complaints. So far, at least, the results seem promising.
At the March 23 meeting of Town Council, Town Manager Alex Ricciardone delivered an early report on the system, which he called ‘Report-It.’ He highlighted the twofold benefits of the feature. Residents have long been accustomed to report local issues, especially potholes, by contacting members of Town Council. Since council members have no direct authority over the town departments that remedy these issues, all they can do is forward their concerns to the appropriate office. By having residents communicate directly with the town, the middleman is cut out, which shortens response time, and also allows council members to devote more of their time to other pressing matters.
Ricciardone shared a pie-chart at the meeting that broke down the requests received during March by category. “Potholes,” he observed, “are inundating the complaint box” thanks to the severity of the past winter, with about three out of four requests relating to paving, curb, or pothole repair. These complaints are automatically forwarded to the Department of Highways, which prioritizes and sets out to fix them.
Next, Ricciardone noted complaints about property code violations, which get referred to the Building Department, and glitches with the new website, which go to the IT Department.
A fourth category mentioned by Ricciardone are speeding complaints. Here the Town Manager contrasted the volume of complaints with the limited resources available to address them. “The Police Department is doing a great job with the resources they have,” he said. “We have a dedicated full-time person whose only job is to do speed [enforcement]. However, if we have a bunch of call-outs, we pull him from the road and assign him to regular patrol. So, if we are short-staffed, speeding enforcement goes down. We have 200 miles of roads, so one person doing radar is not going to be the saving grace. But we are working very hard on speeding.”
Ricciardone asked the Council to encourage residents to use the feature, saying that the more people use it, the more time will be saved for everyone concerned.
Origins of the System, and Coming Improvements
In response to an emailed inquiry, Town Council Chair Paul Chaplinsky provided the Outsider with some additional details on the service. “Residents are encouraged to use the form for a wide range of purposes,” he wrote, “including sharing positive experiences, reporting potholes, identifying signs that need repair, flagging website issues, or raising any other concerns.” He noted that while requests are passed directly to the relevant town department, “emergencies should be reported to the Police Department.”
Chaplinsky credited those who took the lead in the effort: “The Town Council Technology Subcommittee, led by Council Vice Chairwoman Jennifer Clock, has worked in collaboration with the Town Manager and the IT Department to begin implementing a more transparent and accessible way for our community to provide feedback—whether positive, negative, or otherwise… A special thanks to the IT Department and the Town Manager for their work in this, as well as Vice Chair Clock and the Technology Subcommittee for their vision and execution."
He also alluded to forthcoming improvements that should make the process more transparent: “At present, the Town Council can view this data from the Manager through an aggregate dashboard summarizing the types of feedback received. Looking ahead, my goal is to make all requests visible to the public and in Council meetings, with near real-time status updates indicating whether issues have been addressed.”
Putting 'Report-It' to the Test: A Downtown Pothole
In an effort to see how the feature worked, the Outsider decided to report a recently-formed pothole at the northeast corner of Berlin Avenue and Main Street, right in front of the SoCCA storefront. The small but deep hole was a challenging obstacle for drivers turning north onto Route 10.
Clicking the button labelled ‘Feedback Form’ brings the user to a simple Google form. There the requester enters their email, phone, and name, along with a general category for the issue. After selecting ‘Roads & Streets Maintenance,’ we were taken to a second page that asked for details of the problem:
Our pothole report was submitted on Sunday, March 29, at 7:44pm. The very next day, at 8:41am, we received a phone message from the Highways Department. It said that the Town, unfortunately, could not address the issue because Main Street, the street with the pothole, is a state road. The caller directed us to call the state DOT at 860-621-8735.
Later that Monday, at 2:51pm, we returned to the location of the pothole to take a picture of it – only to discover that it had been patched. It would appear a state DOT crew acted with remarkable speed to fill the hole.
In this particular case, then, the town acknowledged the issue in just over 12 hours, and it was resolved, possibly due to reports residents were advised to send to the state, in less than 24 hours.
