A New Tool For Park And Trail Maintenance

Washington County’s Planning & Parks Department announced yesterday that it has a new website for maintenance issues. The website includes a form for park and trail users to fill out and submit. It also keeps a history of submitted issues. But the really cool feature is the map. A user can click anywhere to direct Planning & Parks to a precise location. That’s better than trying to describe “a tree down across the trail … you know, by the weird rock on the left, just before you come up the little hill.”

Planning & Parks expects you to use the tool to report issues at its park, of course, but the mapping feature works everywhere. Let’s say I want to report an issue with one of the bridges in Riverside Park, a City of West Bend property. I can use the tool to produce a picture like this:

Submitting the form to Washington County wouldn’t make sense, but I can email a screen shot to the city’s Parks, Recreation & Forestry staff, who then will know exactly which of Riverside’s four bridges needs attention.

For Washington County park properties, zooming in reveals the details of all the official trails. It would be great to extend that feature to municipal parks across the county and to rebrand the website as a collaborative notification tool. That gets complicated, I know—multiple jurisdictions, plus trails that are maintained by private groups rather than by local governments—but it would be hugely useful. As things stand, the new tool is a good start.