[Durham INC] pothole and other reporting

[TheOcean1 at aol.com]

I have to agree with Randy on this one. 
 
I don't drive around in a City issued car, or carry a city issued cell  
phone, but I often do a "little city work" from my own car, on my own cell  
phone. Example: Illegally posted signs are still one of my pet peeves.
 
They often have the violator's phone number on them, so I call it.  
Conversation goes something like this; "Hey, I noticed your sign on the corner  of 
Main & Broad, how many of those signs did you put out?"
"Oh, about 100, who's asking"
"Just a citizen calling with a friendly  heads up, you see those are 
illegal and you'll probably be hearing from our  Planning dept. They can fine you 
if you leave them up after they notify you of  the violation"
"Oh, we didn't realize they were a code violation, thanks for letting us  
know!"

Often, they call me back a few hours later to let me know they've retrieved 
 all their signs, and to thank me again! Then I thank them for keeping our  
roadways attractive, and b'gosh, the problem was solved.
 
Always wonder if our code enforcers ever do the same thing.
 
Bill  Anderson


In a message dated 2/14/2010 1:31:22 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
rwpickle at gmail.com writes:

Maybe you read the press release (sent to this list earlier in the week  
and published in the newspaper on Sat.) asking us citizens to report potholes. 
 Well here's a much better idea for the City to try. Why not have the City  
workers, who travel all the roads in the City in a weeks time, do it. I  
believe they all have communication equipment with them.
 
Fleet Maintenance says they service some 2100 vehicles used in the  
business of "City". They say 500 are Police cars; so lets forget about the  Police 
doing any reporting, they need to fight crime. And let's just get rid  of 
another 600 vehicles as being out of service, fire protection or otherwise.  
That leaves 1000 vehicles a day that are out there driving around our fair  
City. If in a 5 day period, each vehicle reported only one pothole,  Public 
Works wouldn't be able to even keep up with it. That would be  5000/week! If 
they also reported one ordinance violation a day, that would be  5000 of 
those a week as well
 
Get them to report trash cans left at curbs, weedy lots, illegal dumping,  
graffiti, unregistered vehicles (I'm sure the list goes on...) and any 
number  of other violations they come across as they cris-cross the City on a 
daily  basis. Even train them in what the violations list might look like (or 
just  hand them a print out of simple-common ones with pictures if reading is 
an  issue). After all, we're already paying them and they do work for the  
City. Wouldn't it make our City look a lot better? Our City workers from  
the various departments see much more of this City on a weekly basis then most 
 of us would in months. Let's put them to work reporting some of  these 
City violation/pot hole issues and get this City back on  track.
 
RWP
27  Beverly


_______________________________________________
Durham  INC Mailing  List
list at durham-inc.org
http://www.durham-inc.org/list.html


-------------- next part --------------
HTML attachment scrubbed and removed