Politics & Government

Sewage Spill Shows Weakness of City Website

The delayed reporting of a sewage leak into the Rappahannock River underscores the glaring ineffectiveness of Fredericksburg's website to alert area residents of important information.

Frequently touted by Fredericksburg officials as a shining example of digital accessibility, the city's website is sorely dated and in need of a major overhaul. In its current incarnation it appears as a basic afterthought, an inelegant collection of the most basic functionalities expected of an official government website.

In fulfilling its most vital role, as a vehicle for the distribution of information, Fredericksburg's website fails to be effective. In an age where RSS feeds are a necessity if one is to manage keeping tabs on a dozen or more sites of interest, the only way one can track the city website is by manually checking each page for updates.

Fredericksburg's lack of syndication features is the digital equivalent of requiring your wedding guests pick up their invitations at your house. Can you imagine how your aunt Bertha would feel if she missed your wedding because she forgot to visit you last Christmas?

Its greatest potential asset, an abundant searchable archive of public documents, is hampered by a number of fatal flaws which mar the user experience. Perhaps its greatest flaw is that, in a city with a 300 year history, there is no readily apparent way to search for documents by upload date. Indeed, there is no way to narrow a search result at all, lest it is buried in an arcane corner of the site. Users are left to craft increasingly specific search strings in order to ferret out  relevant information, a frustratingly obsolete hassle when at square one of a research project.

There is no more perfect example of the failings of Fredericsburg's municpal website than the delayed notice through which most area residents learned of

Find out what's happening in Fredericksburgwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

During a holiday weekend, when area news reporting organzations are predictably understaffed, the city's dissemination of the news of the sewage leak left much to be desired. Press releases, apparently ordered to be distributed on the same day the leak was discovered, were not received by Patch. If they were disseminated at all, they were not reported on for days. The first news reports of the leak were published by the Free Lance-Star on Monday afternoon, nearly five days after the leak was first discovered by city staff.

Public Works Director Doug Fawcett says that the city did its job in alerting the public to the threat by and through a message posted on the city website.

Find out what's happening in Fredericksburgwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

However, when working with a website which doesn't alert its busy followers that an update has been posted, the Public Works Department might as well have thrown its message into the wind.

With next year's municipal budget process gearing up, Fredericksburg officials would be wise to include money for a city public information officer to better manage the dissemination of pressing news.


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here