GrokSurf's San Diego

Back on November 16 while driving in my neighborhood on Everglades Avenue I came across a road hazard: broken asphalt around a manhole cover. I filed a report with the San Diego City Street Division on their online service request form. I also had these pictures but the form had no provision for including them.

Tonight, almost three weeks later, I received this email message from the Street Division:

From: “street_service@sandiego.gov”
To: “Janczyn, George”
Content-Class: urn:content-classes:message
Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2009 18:23:20 -0800
Subject: Street Response

Thank you for your recent request to Street Division. We have determined from the information provided that this area of responsibility belongs to: Metro Wastewater Department, they can be reached by calling 619-515-3525, option #2.

Of course it should not have taken almost three weeks for this response which appears to involve no investigation beyond reading my report. It also would have been appropriate and polite for them to have forwarded the problem report to the Wastewater Department themselves instead of telling me to call. I suspect the repair would be carried out by the same crew but it’s a financial responsibility thing.

The city would really do well to develop a 311-reporting service and get departments to communicate with each other, as I recently wrote in this suggestion for dealing with such fix-it problems. In the meanwhile, I’ll make I made the call. While I’m at it, I’ll pass along a copy of this to the U-T’s “Just Fix-it” column.