THE GOOD:
Yesterday,
I woke up at 6:30 am to drive my fiancee to the work. As I left our driveway on State Street in New Haven I noticed that the property next door to ours had been vandalized with a huge piece of graffiti. As I drove down State Street I noticed 14 other locations that were covered in the work of the same "tagger."

After reporting the incident to NHPD I returned home and reported all of the tickets on seeclickfix. On Upper State Street we have contract a worker to remove graffiti. The Clean Team, as they're called, have created watch areas around Upper State Street on seeclickfix and respond within 24 hours to our graffiti complaints.

At 10:30 I left my house to ride my bike to "the office"(I freelance. yes it's a coffee shop.)
On the way down State Street I noticed that some of the graffiti had already been removed. I pulled up to one of the workers removing the graffiti and to my surprise it was not our Clean Team worker. The City of New Haven's livable city initiative had received the email also and was well on their way to cleaning up the whole street. By noon all traces of our overnight vandal were gone before the majority of business owners residents and visitors could see the work.
Check out State Street in New Haven to see all the blue tickets. The city of New Haven did an amazing job this morning. Also a big thanks to our Alderman, Roland Lemar, who also got the clicket updates (he has a seeclickfix watch around his ward)and gave LCI a call to make sure they had seen the emails.
Accountability and efficiency is what seeclickfix is all about. Start clicking in your hood and slowly you will start to see the same results. As our sideclick, David Torke, in Buffalo said to me yesterday, "the anecdote will become the rule".

THE BAD
In my estimation the vandal that necessitated the cleanup cost the taxpayers of the city of New Haven over $2,000 yesterday. It may seem like a game to the kids that keep LCI and the Clean Team busy, but it goes far beyond that...

THE UGLY
$2,000 in The City Of New Haven is about 1/2 the cost of what it takes to keep a homeless shelter open for one night. In a time when cities in CT and around the country are facing tough economic challenges we need the vandals that piss away our money and their families money to call a truce as they are literally putting people out on the street.