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County staff outline QAlert front- and back-end improvements after users report gaps in bike-lane and follow-up responses
Summary
Nicole Jackson, QAlert business systems analyst, told committees the county is redesigning the 'Report a Problem' front end, auditing department workflows and adding clearer status messages, performance dashboards and possible public-facing heat maps to reduce duplicates and improve routing for bike-lane and other transportation complaints.
David Patton and Nicole Jackson briefed PAC and BAC on the county’s Report a Problem system (QAlert), describing a large volume of citizen requests and a planned front- and back-end overhaul to improve routing and communications.
Patton noted the scale: a slide showed roughly 74,000 requests since January of the prior year and that transportation- and safety-related requests comprise a small percentage (about 2%) of the total. "So there's not a great match here between the concerns of the people on committees and this system for handling them," he said, urging committees to understand the system’s scale when suggesting new request types.
Nicole Jackson, the system administrator, described a recent journey-mapping effort (April–June) with 19 department groups and explained changes under way: revised front-end wording and dropdowns, optional clarifying questions to route reports to the correct department, Power BI dashboards for departmental metrics, and standardized closure messages so submitters know what action was taken. "We're working on the user interface…so it goes into what is being blocked…and then there are optional questions that give more information so we could then send out the proper team, and rectify it right away," she said.
Committee members gave examples of recurring problems — trash cans left in bike lanes, construction debris, and tickets that are closed with no explanatory follow-up. They recommended a public-facing heat map to avoid duplicate tickets and an option to 'upvote' existing reports, clearer SLAs tied to realistic timelines, and better interagency coordination when other authorities (e.g., VDOT, National Park Service) own the infrastructure. Nicole accepted the suggestions as input items on the roadmap and said she would raise them with the county manager’s office and in user-group meetings.
