Potholes? Broken playground equipment? Columbia has an app for that & promises quicker fixes
Have you ever noticed a malfunctioning cross-walk signal in Columbia and thought to yourself that someone should fix that? Well, there’s an app for that.
The city of Columbia has launched a new tool meant to make it easier to report things like potholes or broken traffic signals, as well as pay your water bills, check your garbage pick up schedule and more.
How to use it
The new app, MyColaSC, is free to download in the Apple and Android app stores. You can register for an account to track your ongoing requests, or you can make reports anonymously without an account.
In the app, you can make a request, mark the problem on a map and even add photos and/or videos showing the problem. Then, the app will update you when the request has been received, dispatched, and when it has been completed.
Beyond service requests, residents can use the app to find where to pay parking tickets and other bills, register your pet and make a Freedom of Information request, among other things.
Columbia’s Director of Customer Service Tiffany Latimer during a presentation to the City Council this week, called the app a “major step forward” in Columbia’s efforts to be more transparent and responsive to residents.
A second try
This is not the first time Columbia has launched an app meant to help residents make work requests and pay their bills. The previous version of the app, launched in 2018, was mired in problems, and even when residents submitted work requests, they had no way of tracking the status of the requests.
Still, more than 5,500 work requests were made via the city’s phone app or web app between 2018 and 2023, according to city data. Columbia HR Director Pamela Benjamin previously told the council the goal is to build on that but to provide more information than the previous app did.
“We’re busy working, but we’re not necessarily telling them,” Benjamin told council during a work session in February to discuss the new app.
Now, residents can submit a work request and see its status in real time.
The app will also show you other work requests made in the city. So if you’ve been seeing the same pothole every day on your way home from work and you’re curious if someone has reported it, that will be visible in the app, too. (There is also an option to keep your work requests private so they do not show up on that public list.)
Councilman Peter Brown said a lot of the work is getting the “invisible” aspects of the city’s system more visible.
It’s not immediately clear how much the revamped app cost the city. A city spokesperson said the largest cost was city staff time because a large committee met over the past year to plan the app. The only monetary expense was to upgrade the app’s platform, which was estimated to cost under $10,000.
Columbia paid the app’s vendor Granicus $26,000 in January and $23,000 in June, according to city spending reports. But the city uses the vendor for other purposes as well, including the online hosting of its meeting agendas.
The app is already in use, with more than two dozen public requests visible in the app since its launch this week, ranging from reports of potholes and downed trees to requests for water leak checks.
