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MacIntyre: Taxpayers deserve better data transparency

Greater Sudbury has an open data policy, says Ward 12 candidate Jeff MacIntyre, but continues to ignore it to the detriment of taxpayers
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Jeff MacIntyre is running for the city council seat in Ward 12.

This isn’t just about roads or potholes, but we’ll start there. 

In early 2019, as with any given year, potholes were a hot topic. It seemed a particularly bad year for vehicle damage, and Sudbury.com began a feature looking at the worst potholes in the city, even coming up with a mascot, Pothole Pete. 

My business was hired to work with Sudbury.com in order to develop a pothole reporting app. The concept was simple: people could take a photo of a pothole and have it reported to the city, and the app would create a map of all potholes reported. Because there is a specific amount of time after a pothole is reported before the city is liable, the app would allow people to identify if the pothole that damaged their car was eligible for compensation. 

We believed there was logic and efficiency to the idea that would benefit everyone. 

Before endeavouring on this path, I reached out to the city and confirmed with them that an email with the location, GPS co-ordinates and a photo of the pothole would be sufficient data to report a pothole. 

With this information, we created the app with two options for the city to receive the data: an email through 311, as they had already stated was acceptable, or; through a data feed that they could directly integrate into their system. 

The data feed was rejected outright, and a long back and forth ensued with the city asking for specific formatting requirements in the emails to be received. The app finally launched, but nearing the end of the worst of pothole season. 

At that point, I was contacted by the IT department at the city, who correctly surmised the pothole app must be creating a data feed — the one that was originally offered but not accepted. This time, they requested and received this data feed with thanks for providing it. 

Here’s where it stops being about potholes. 

During this exchange, I was also informed that through the city’s Argis platform subscription, the City did, in fact, have access to an app that performs this exact same task (and much more.) 

I was taken aback. Not only did someone at the city know an app was being developed by a third party, but they already had an easy tool to allow citizens to report issues in their community and in their neighbourhoods. 

They just weren’t using it.

This would be bad enough had it not been the case that years before this issue came up, a group that I was part of lobbied the city to implement the G8 Open Data Charter. Through the adoption of this charter — which the City did do — the city is supposed to make data open by default.

“Open Data by Default” is the first principle of the G8 Open Data Charter, which was adopted by Canada in 2013. Open By Default means that data approvals should start from a position of data openness and that data should be released unless privacy, security, legal or other restrictions exist. 

Instead of asking the question “Why should we release this data?”, staff should instead ask, “Are there any reasons why we can’t release this data?”

By not using this tool, and therefore by not publishing a map of road hazards (and I would imagine a number of other data sets), the city is violating their own adopted policy. 

It is not news to most that Sudbury is over a billion dollars behind on infrastructure maintenance. This is what we mean by infrastructure debt. But what we don't know is how much farther we are falling behind every year, which is the infrastructure deficit. Unfortunately, there is no publicly visible plan that I am aware of to show the taxpayer how the cIty might make up that annual gap.

I am aware of potential solutions.

For example, there are road maintenance planning tools that place sensors on all city vehicles to map issues on roadways continuously. With roads representing a huge portion of the infrastructure budget annually, this would help determine how far behind we are in real-time on infrastructure improvements pertaining to roads, and identify areas that, without proper maintenance, will fall quickly into a higher-cost repair.
We are far behind and can’t continue to make these mistakes on infrastructure; better data will lead to better and more transparent decisions. Keeping a real-time map that showcases opportunities for preventative maintenance will allow us to extend our infrastructure budget while keeping costs down.

Let’s be clear: this is not just a roads issue. This is a transparency issue. The city is obliged to make this data public for all taxpayers, and as your representatives, councillors need this knowledge so that we can begin to steer the ship back towards proper management and repair of our infrastructure. (And if any of them were privy to this information and did not say anything, shame on them.)

As the councillor for Ward 12 and a voice at the table for the community, I will commit to making this type of data not only available but easy to understand. After a four-year term, you will have clear information upon which to judge my colleagues and me, and Open By Default will go from being a meaningless buzzword to a management imperative.

Jeff MacIntyre is seeking the city council seat for Ward 12 in the Oct. 24 municipal election.


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