Acknowledged

I just went by there and found there was no vehicle parked there.

That's great, but as you can see from the photo and reports, there was. Was a conversation held with the residents of the property explaining that such parking is not allowed? If not, then the job is NOT COMPLETED.

Acknowledged

If you had spoken to your neighbor you would know the circumstances. There is a disabled person who gets dropped off next to the door. The car was gone moments after you reported it. I did speak with your neighbor about it and he understands what the law is.

There is no need to be rude or to yell.

This issue is closed.

Closed

It's not rude or yelling to capitalize two words for emphasis.

That's a nice story they told you, but I question it's veracity or completeness. Why was the vehicle there for almost an hour or more then? I reported it only after seeing it there on my way both to someplace else and on my return trip almost an hour later. Looked like a tailgate party to me, honestly.

Does it really take an hour to drop a disabled person off?

Is it legal to park on lawns for this purpose? If so, that's news to me, but good to know.

Anyway, if you did speak to this person, and obtained that information, perhaps it would be prudent to share that information in a comment/status update here on SCF when closing the ticket. The purpose of SCF is, after all, to make it easy to keep all stakeholders in any issue informed. We see a lot of issues closed without any information on what, if anything, was done by either Code Enforcement or property owners. That's a missed opportunity to make the public aware of all the work that's going on "in the background" so to speak. SCF is great, if public officials use it as intended.

Mr. or Ms. Baker,

Thank you for letting us know the purpose of SCF.

Keep in mind that the City Officials are the users who have to decide what is appropriate for documenting publicly. We usually use a great deal of discretion with every post because each incident often includes a great deal more in dialogue with the property owner.

We usually hear from neighbors who say things like, "people should mind their own business" or "tell the person they could just come over and talk to me and be a good neighbor rather than calling in a government enforcement agency".

Those are polite compared to most of what we hear. We usually choose to sanitize the commentary to keep it civil.

SCF was not designed to be Front Porch Forum. We have too many reports to write detailed comments on every issue. We try to spend our time fixing the issue not talking about it. We have taken in almost 4,000 complaints on SCF since we took on this task. 90 percent of the reports are currently closed. Our average time to close all complaints is 17 days. By comparison to all the communities using SCF their average time to closed incidents is 44 days.

The Burlington Electric Department has started using SCF too. They have already received 63 complaints and 77 percent of them are closed with an average of 16 days to close their issues.

We think Burlington is doing a pretty darn good job.

As to your question, "Does it really take an hour to drop a disabled person off? I would say it probably depends on the person's disability. I know we were there and found no illegal parking just 36 minutes after we received the report.

I'm glad you think SCF is great. We agree. We think we use it as efficiently as we are reasonably able. I realize we cannot make every person happy. We have done the best we could.

Thanks for your reply! Thanks especially for all the statistics on SCF reports, it's fascinating.

I am sorry to hear people are impolite to CE staff in person.

Since I was involved in child care activities at the time, stopping to chat with the people there was not really an option. Nor should it be a prerequisite to reporting a chronic known problem using this app.

No one is looking for a novel on each issue, just a one or two line update when it's closed. It's really not too much to ask.

Thanks for your efforts.

There are no prerequisites to reporting.

Actually the people we talk to in person are not impolite to us. They ask us to send an impolite response to the person complaining. We take the high road and try to keep it civil.

Sorry for that confusion.