Finding humor in government
Curious about the kooky calls phoned into the Salt Lake County Mayor’s Office? We certainly were.
The state’s most-populous county maintains a publicly accessible database that logs thousands of constituent complaints and calls for service dialed into the Mayor’s Office.
Although the reports read much like a police blotter -- snowplow tears up parking strip, traffic signal not working, ducklings trapped beneath a storm drain -- they provide enough detail to dig up sometimes-laughable case files about the phone calls that frequent the county’s highest office.
You’ll read about pink fire hydrants, mattresses flopping in the road at midnight and a woman who wants the county to trim her apple trees.
The information is accessible under the Government Records Access and Management Act to anyone who wants it. And it won’t take long to compile. We requested a 10-month report listing thousands of phone calls. It took less than two minutes for the Mayor’ Office to generate the spreadsheet and ship it to us via e-mail.
-- JS
The state’s most-populous county maintains a publicly accessible database that logs thousands of constituent complaints and calls for service dialed into the Mayor’s Office.
Although the reports read much like a police blotter -- snowplow tears up parking strip, traffic signal not working, ducklings trapped beneath a storm drain -- they provide enough detail to dig up sometimes-laughable case files about the phone calls that frequent the county’s highest office.
You’ll read about pink fire hydrants, mattresses flopping in the road at midnight and a woman who wants the county to trim her apple trees.
The information is accessible under the Government Records Access and Management Act to anyone who wants it. And it won’t take long to compile. We requested a 10-month report listing thousands of phone calls. It took less than two minutes for the Mayor’ Office to generate the spreadsheet and ship it to us via e-mail.
-- JS
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