As the world of technology progresses, the city of Covington decided to launch a new free app that allows citizens to report and track “quality of life” issues and requests for city services.
The App is called “Covington Connects” and is powered by SeeClickFix, the service that Covington is using and partnering with to make Covington Connects a reality.
Covington City Manager Regan Bolli said this will make it easier for community members to communicate to the city problems they may see.
In short, he said the city is hoping this provides better customer service to residents.
“So potholes, or any kind of code violations that people may notice, it’s an easy tool to pull your phone out, take a picture, click a couple buttons and it sends the city all the information,” Bolli said. “We get an image of the actual issues, we get a GPS location of it and then it’s automatically entered into a tracking system and the person who submits the complaint or comment or issue, can check a box to be notified whenever the status changes or progresses.”
Previously, Bolli said the city had been using an older more outdated system, “Citizen Action Requests.” This method took a longer time to connect residents to relevant staff.
Bolli explained that people had to come into the office and fill out a form that would go to an employee who would then determine which department it needed to go to, making it a longer process. And then on top of that, there was no way to track the progress of what a person may have submitted.
“It seemed a bit outdated. You could also go online and fill out the form, but we didn’t have a mobile application for it. This was just an effort to modernize our approach to giving citizens the opportunity to communicate with us,” Bolli said.
In terms on uniqueness, Bolli said this is the city’s first time actually using a mobile app.
“You can go to the respected app store for those two platforms and download Covington Connects,” Bolli said. “That’s the unique part about it, it’s mobile and goes anywhere with you and makes it really easy to submit it.”
He said the other advantage to this new app is residents knows how their issue is being handled.
To track where problems in the city are occurring, residents can go to http://www.covingtonwa.gov/covingtonconnects/, which will bring that person to a “real-time” map. On this map, it pinpoints the exact location a person has had an issue of some sort.
Bolli said the app has only been out for a couple of weeks now. It was first released onto the Android phones and then onto the Apple store.
As more people download and use the app, Bolli said SeeClickFix will be able to determine how many downloads there have been. He said the city can tell how many people have been using it just by the amount of submittals they have been getting.
He said in the few days that the Android app was out there were several people that used the app.
“(This is) something we’re really excited about as we make small, incremental steps to make things more accessible and easy to use for our residents,” Bolli said.
