It’ll be May on Monday, and do you know what that means? Ryan Sorenson says “It is spring, and that means our crews are out and about, hard at work, gettin’ caught up filling those potholes.”
“Really?”, you might ask…how could they not know about that five-gallon hole in front of your house? The answer according to Sorenson is, “We have over 200 miles of road in the City of Sheboygan…we need you to let us know where all the potholes are.” So the next question is, “How”? The answer is, “Go on Click to Report on the Department of Public Works Website and let us know.”
Sheboygan Mayor Ryan Sorenson recently made a video about potholes, and we spoke with the Mayor about the “click to report” options and the video promoting it. He told us that as social media and smartphones are more-or-less everywhere, using video to inform is a natural fit, and using a smartphone, especially when something – like a pothole – is seen in the moment and needs attention…it doesn’t take much time to report it, or to see the results. Sorenson told us, “Yeah, on your smartphone…and usually we have some folks if they’re out and about on a walk, or taking their dogs out, if they’ve got a pothole, you just take a picture, it takes two…three seconds to fill out the form and send it our way and it gets to our public works crews, and they get out there within 48 hours to fill the potholes.”
Sheboygan isn’t exceptional in the number of potholes which, according to Triple-A, cost US drivers $3 billion dollars in repairs each year. Mayor Sorenson admits that “we’re playing catch-up”, but he’s hoping the click-to-report option works to speed up the repair process. As for whether or not it works, the Mayor offered this: “I think one of the feed-backs is that we’ve been getting a lot of folks report potholes.”
If you’d like to report a pothole, or even code violations, dark street lights, and many other general requests, you can use this direct link to get to the Click-to-Report webpage.
Comments