Photo by Eric Ayres The Wheeling 311 online request tracking system has undergone significant upgrades in recent months. The new interface for the city’s non-emergency reporting system is much more mobile -friendly, allowing citizens to report everything from potholes to dilapidated properties and missed sanitation pickups —straight from their smartphones.

WHEELING — Recent upgrades to the city of Wheeling’s 311 request tracking system have brought significant improvements to user access, allowing citizens to easily and efficiently report non-emergency incidents to city departments.

This summer, new Ward 2 Councilman Ben Seidler expressed concerns about the city’s 311 system and the city’s ability to follow through with various service requests submitted through the online platform. Since then, Seidler said the software provider — EvoGov — has been working with the city on developing upgrades that help city department heads more efficiently receive and respond to issues such as missed sanitation pickups, pothole repairs, property maintenance complaints and other non-emergency service requests.

The city’s 311 system was first introduced in January 2019. Linked to the city’s official website, the Wheeling 311 request tracking system allows citizens to send location-based service requests for many of a multitude of issues that the city can address once officials are made aware of a problem.

“There have been some great improvements to the 311 system,” Seidler said.

“It is now a lot more mobile friendly. If you log on to wheelingwv.gov/311, you’re going to notice that if you’re doing that from your smartphone, it’s incredibly more user friendly.”

Seidler said Wheeling residents can now easily access the 311 system from their mobile phone to register complaints or service requests for anything from potholes to blight issues.

“It’s basically anything you can think of that the city needs to address,” Seidler said, noting that additional improvements to the system are still in the works, but the new mobile device capabilities that are now in use are a huge step forward in the overall system upgrades.

“We still have more work to do, but it’s now actually usable from a smartphone.”

Residents can access the 311 system, take a picture with the camera on their phone and submit the photo along with a request for service straight from their mobile device.

The process of making submissions to the request tracking system is much simpler and faster than before, and city departments are expected to be able to more efficiently manage the “tickets” that are submitted and address different issues in a more timely manner moving forward with the upgrades that are being made.

“Thank you to our vendor who has helped us with that,” Seidler said.

“Again, we have more work to do, but it’s a big win for us, and I think it’s going to help the residents to actually utilize that tool.”