City council focused on technology issues during its recent meeting, after city administration presented a report about departmental activities during the fourth quarter of 2021.
Requests for service
The IT department produced a report about the inquiries city hall received from residents through its phone app from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, prompting Coun. Crystal Froese to ask whether city administration was using that data to prioritize problems.
“Now that we’re getting more accurate data from people and being able to track issues, are we using that information?” she said. “Like, even based on the average resolution time, are we finding efficiencies or … gaps in some of our services?”
This is not a predictive analytics-type tool and city administration is limited in what it can pull from the system, said Darrin Stephanson, director of public works and utilities. Customers drive many of these complaints; some requests have merit, some are repetitive, and some focus on services the city doesn’t provide.
“There is a lot of information in there. There is also no really good tool in that software to search or create themes to drive analytics off that,” he added. “I don’t think this is a solution for that.”
Parking app
The City of Moose Jaw’s HotSpot Parking app generated $131,114 in total revenue during the fourth quarter of 2021, while 874 people signed up to use the app, a council report showed. In comparison, there was $278,084 total revenue generated during Q3 and 2,747 people registered to use the app.
The revenue that the City of Moose Jaw earned during those two quarters was $15,158.
That money that the municipality earned goes into regular parking revenues under parking meters, said finance director Brian Acker.
Bus passes
Coun. Dawn Luhning expressed concern that bus passes could not be purchased online and wondered if the IT department could fix that. She also wondered if a transit function on the HotSpot app could address this problem.
City administration has discussed such a feature with the software company, while the department of public works — which oversees transit — is working with IT to implement an initiative for digital passes, said Stephanson.
“I’d like to see it rolled out before school returns in the fall, but there is a lot of work ahead of us in this process,” he added.
While it would not be a massive undertaking to have HotSpot offer bus passes, city administration would need to create a timeline and determine the necessary steps to implement such a feature, said IT director Wade MacKay.
Internal tracking system
Luhning asked city administration during the fourth quarter about developing an internal message board to track residents’ requests so council and city hall knew which members were receiving requests, what those inquiries were and how they were resolved.
In turn, the IT department urged council to use an internal request-for-service system, which would allow members to have access to all available information about specific issues.
While the IT department recommends that council use this internal app, Luhning was unsatisfied with that solution. She wanted a central digital location that current and future councils could access and see how past councillors addressed issues they received and the history with that issue or resident.
“So almost like a running corresponding list of things. So, I look forward to that coming,” she added.
Coun. Kim Robinson agreed with Luhning’s idea.
“That message board is very important. I’d like to see a priority on that,” he added.
The next regular council meeting is Monday, March 14.
