POULSBO — Locals know the common complaints around town: parking, graffiti, potholes.
Before, such concerns were marched down to City Hall. Now, submitting complaints to the city is as easy as using a smartphone.
The City of Poulsbo has taken a step to meet its tech-savvy residents by offering an app.
“This is just another way for people to communicate with us. It’s not replacing anything and best of all, it’s free,” City Clerk Kylie Purves said at a May 21 Finance and Administration Committee meeting.
Purves introduced the app, See, Click, Fix, to the committee. The app allows residents to report issues and complaints, such as graffiti, pot holes, trash, or other concerns. Purves noted that it is not for reporting emergencies.
The app is free and can be used on a smartphone. Once downloaded, a resident can report an issue or submit a complaint.
For example, if a Poulsbohemian sees graffiti on a street corner, they can use their smartphone to report the address of the graffiti, and even take a picture of it to accompany the report. Or they can use the See, Click Fix website. The issue is then sent to Purves at City Hall.
But the report isn’t a one-way communication. Users can see, on a map, all issues that have been reported in Poulsbo. They can comment on the issues, and even vote to get them fixed, or click to follow a report and receive updates as it develops.
So if one resident reports that street corner graffiti, another can see the report and comment about it, and vote to have the problem fixed.
The app uses the phone’s location to base its reports. Other Kitsap locales use See, Click, Fix, such as Bainbridge Island. Once a phone is carried over to Bainbridge Island, the island logo will appear and all reports go there. Once the phone enters Poulsbo again, the Poulsbo logo will appear and reports will be sent to Moe Street.
It also benefits city staff by offering a tracking process for resident complaints.
“The clunky paper process isn’t tracking that something is an issue for people, but now everybody has a smart phone and they can use this,” Purves said.
The city is experimenting with the app, working out the kinks in the system, before fully embracing it. Purves said the app is currently live, however. Within the next couple of weeks, a button will be offered on the City of Poulsbo’s website that will link to See, Click, Fix, allowing residents to submit reports online. Purves also said that in the future, the city could look into other means of engaging the public with the service, such as placing an iPad at the front desk of City Hall. Residents can then use the tablet to report an issue if they do not have access to a phone or computer.
“The idea is that we all get complaints all the time, but there is no centralized way to handle them,” Mayor Becky Erickson said at the May 21 meeting. “Now you can download the app, and everybody can use this application.
So we can see all of them and we have a way to track them.”
“If I get an email, what I plan on doing is logging it in for them,” Erickson added.
