City hall encourages residents to use its app to submit concerns about issues such as roads, but some users have noticed that the municipality has failed to follow through on their submissions.
During the recent city council meeting, Coun. Dawn Luhning raised the issue of users’ problems with the app, saying several people told her they submitted their concerns through the program and received a response saying the issue had been resolved. However, the city had done nothing to resolve their inquiry.
“I think we need to have a conversation about that. A few citizens aren’t happy about that with the resolution message and nothing is happening,” she said. “So maybe there are some tweaks we need to do.”
City manager Maryse Carmichael agreed, saying that is something she flagged when she arrived in mid-May. She noted that the strategic team spoke about recently and is implementing changes, which residents should soon see with new requests.
“We won’t be able to go back to all of the previous ones (submissions), but we will see a change for future requests on the app,” she said.
Residents should resubmit their original reports if they are about an “important matter” but should also ensure that city hall has officially replied to the message, Carmichael added. Not every inquiry needs to be resubmitted, considering the public works department receives hundreds of daily messages.
Tax notices
City hall recently sent tax notices to residents, but many people received duplicates, said Coun. Jamey Logan. He wondered how many duplicates the municipality had issued, what they cost the city, why it happened and how city hall planned to fix the problem.
City hall sent out 600 additional notices to ensure it complied with legislation and that certain homeowners legally slated to receive the tax notices did so, city administration told council. Meanwhile, a “conversion” problem with the new in-house software also led to these extra tax notices going out.
Many people were confused about why they were receiving the tax notices in late August when city hall normally issues them in June, Luhning said.
She wondered if city hall had developed a communications plan to inform residents that the assessment roll would be late this year and that the new in-house financial software program would take longer to implement.
City hall released two media releases advising the public that it would issue the tax notices later this summer, said Carmichael.
The next regular council meeting is Monday, Aug. 28.
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