Councilors push to give residents new mobile app to report issues

Plans to create a mobile app for Waltham residents to report issues moved forward Monday night, as city councilors directed Mayor Jeannette A. McCarthy and IT Department Director Donald J. Aucoin to take action on its development.

The mobile app would allow residents to report various nonemergency issues, such as issues with trash removal and broken streetlights, to the city’s departments.

Currently, the city has a web portal that residents can use on their computers or via a mobile phone’s browser to report nonemergency issues, but city officials believe a mobile app would make it easier for residents to share concerns.

“The biggest challenge that our current application has is that there’s no mobile component to it,” Aucoin told the City Council’s Economic and Community Development Committee at its Monday night meeting.

Aucoin said that residents might view a mobile phone app as a more convenient avenue for reporting problems as opposed to accessing the web portal.

Committee members asked Aucoin to produce a report on all requests made by residents through the web portal since January 2021 to get information on who is reporting issues, what types of problems are being reported and if updates on those problems have been created in the portal. 

The web portal does not allow ward councilors to see reports on requests made in their ward.

Ward 8 Councilor Cathyann Harris, Ward 9 Councilor Robert G. Logan and Councilor-at-Large Carlos A. Vidal in March presented a resolution urging McCarthy “to adopt a web-based reporting system that will allow residents to report problems through the use of a mobile app.”

At Wednesday night’s meeting, Aucoin said that in the past McCarthy has not made citywide mobile application projects a priority for public funding.

But during the Monday night meeting McCarthy told the committee that she was open to researching software options for the application. However, she said she wants to speak with the departments that would be fielding requests from the mobile app to determine what they need from a mobile reporting system.

The Economic and Community Development Committee asked McCarthy to work with the IT, Consolidated Public Works, Parks and Recreation and Wires departments to determine what reporting software would work the best. Aucoin told the committee that Consolidated Public Works is the primary user of the web portal and would be the ideal department to ask about how well it works as a reporting system. 

Committee members also addressed the cost of such a project.

“So really what we’re kind of coming down to is cost, and whether or not there’s a will to pay for something like this,” said Councilor-at-Large Colleen Bradley-MacArthur, who asked the IT Department to explore whether any grant money is available to pay for the project.