A decade after San Diego launched what was essentially envisioned as a smartphone-powered pothole hotline, the City's enormously popular Get It Done smartphone application and reporting system is undergoing another major expansion, this time targeting the sprawling network of parks and recreation facilities used by millions of residents and visitors every year.
The changes will ultimately allow residents to identify as many as 46 distinct problems inside City parks rather than funneling virtually everything through a generic parks complaint, providing maintenance crews with substantially better information before they ever arrive at a site. The more detailed reporting system has already been introduced through the City's web version of Get It Done and is expected to migrate into the heavily used smartphone application later this summer or early fall.
Among the increasingly specific options now available are damaged playground and exercise equipment, broken benches, malfunctioning drinking fountains, irrigation and sprinkler problems, restroom maintenance and plumbing issues, park trash and litter, brush management concerns and park-enforcement problems including off-leash dogs. The City's current Get It Done portal now separates many of those issues into individual reporting channels rather than treating "parks" as a single catch-all category.
That sounds like a relatively simple software improvement, but it could fundamentally change what happens after a resident photographs a problem and presses submit. Under the older system, Parks & Recreation employees receiving a generic report might need to determine whether the complaint required a plumber, electrician, irrigation technician, grounds crew, park ranger or another employee. Categorizing problems at the beginning allows requests to be routed more intelligently while giving the City much cleaner data about where its park system is actually failing.
The expansion is particularly significant because parks generate an extraordinary volume of Get It Done activity. According to information provided by City officials, roughly 700 of the more than 1,000 reports arriving through Get It Done on a typical day involve City parks.
Perhaps more useful than the additional categories is another change that addresses one of the longest-running frustrations surrounding Get It Done: residents often had little idea whether their complaint should take two days, two weeks or two years. The City has increasingly begun publishing expected response or completion times by category, and the differences can be dramatic.
For the newly expanded Parks & Recreation categories, San Diego currently estimates approximately five days to address trash and litter, 20 days for sprinkler and irrigation problems, 30 days for drinking fountains and 45 days for park equipment. Restroom complaints are divided further: cleanliness or supply issues, such as missing toilet paper, are estimated at five days, while repair and maintenance problems are estimated at 15 days.
Those estimates are particularly important because the same Get It Done platform handles problems with vastly different levels of complexity. Elsewhere in the system, for example, the City's published estimate is 90 days for a storm-drain problem and approximately 150 days to complete non-emergency tree work if work is necessary. Vegetation encroachment involving private property currently carries a stunning published estimate of 629 days because of the code-enforcement process and existing backlog.
Providing those numbers does not make the wait shorter. It does, however, solve part of a communications problem that has dogged Get It Done practically since its creation: residents submitting a report frequently have no idea what happens next. City officials also hope more accurate estimates will reduce duplicate reports from residents who assume their first complaint disappeared into a bureaucratic abyss.
Another particularly interesting component of the expansion centers on San Diego's increasingly contentious battle over dogs running illegally off leash, especially on fields shared by the City and San Diego Unified School District. The City plans to deploy QR codes that will make reporting off-leash activity easier and potentially allow park personnel to respond while a violation is still occurring.
San Diego generally requires dogs in City parks to remain on a leash no longer than eight feet unless they are inside a specifically designated off-leash area. The City's own Parks & Recreation website now directs non-emergency leash-law complaints in parks and on beaches through Get It Done. That may sound like an oddly specific municipal problem until considering what has happened at school recreation fields.
Residents increasingly used school fields as unofficial dog parks during the pandemic, and disputes continued after students returned. School officials have reported problems involving off-leash dogs, damaged fields and feces left where children subsequently play.
The enforcement system then became considerably more confusing after budget cuts eliminated San Diego Humane Society patrols that had previously responded to such violations. Some signs continued directing residents toward Humane Society enforcement even when officers were no longer responding to those calls, while efforts to direct users to Get It Done initially ran ahead of the app's ability to accept the appropriate reports. The latest changes are intended to close that gap.
Yet even the City's current Get It Done page includes an important caveat: park-enforcement reports, including off-leash dog complaints, "are not acted on immediately." That qualifier raises an obvious question about the effectiveness of a QR-code system designed partly around timely enforcement. Reporting a dog that was off leash Tuesday morning is of limited value if an enforcement officer reaches the field Thursday afternoon. City officials are hoping the more direct reporting pathway and better internal routing can make those complaints actionable quickly enough to change behavior.
The expansion arrives shortly after Get It Done celebrated its tenth anniversary. What began in 2016 as an effort frequently described inside City Hall as essentially a "pothole app" has evolved into one of the primary interfaces between San Diegans and their municipal government.
The City says the mobile application has been downloaded approximately 275,000 times and the platform has received more than 3.5 million reports during its first decade. It now handles everything from graffiti, potholes and missed trash pickups to illegal dumping, parking violations, homeless encampments, broken streetlights, ADA concerns, short-term-rental violations, trees, sidewalks and stormwater problems.
The underlying idea remains remarkably straightforward: instead of calling a department and trying to determine which government employee is responsible for a broken object, residents photograph it, identify its location and send the information into a centralized system connected to City work-management operations. The City's application automatically incorporates location information associated with photographs, and Get It Done data is also made available through San Diego's Open Data infrastructure. The City's current public portal even allows residents to view individual reports and their statuses.
When it works, it is difficult to argue with the concept. And plenty of San Diegans say it works remarkably well. Public reviews collected over the years include residents praising the City for quickly removing illegal dumping, repairing infrastructure and following up directly on reports. One early user reported that an abandoned property's longstanding trash problem was cleaned within five days of filing a complaint, while another said the system successfully handled both a dumped mattress and an abandoned vehicle.
More recently, a May 2026 reviewer called the interface intuitive, uncluttered and remarkably trouble-free for a government application. But that is only half the story.
Get It Done's biggest weakness has never really been the idea behind the application. It is what happens after the report leaves the phone. A March analysis by Axios found nearly 85,000 unresolved Get It Done cases citywide, with some complaints remaining open for astonishing lengths of time. Streetlight maintenance and sidewalk repair alone reportedly accounted for more than 12,000 open cases apiece, while 61 cases had apparently remained unresolved for more than a decade.
The backlog can make some categories almost self-defeating. Consider San Diego's 72-hour parking rule. A vehicle is supposed to move after remaining on a public street for more than 72 hours, yet Axios found those complaints were taking an average of approximately 46 days to close in 2026, up from 43 days the previous year. In some northern communities, the average reportedly exceeded 100 days. If enforcement arrives weeks after a vehicle is reported, the car may have moved several times by then, leaving the responding officer with nothing to cite.
And City officials readily acknowledge that Get It Done cannot manufacture staffing that doesn't exist. SDPD has attributed parking-related delays partly to personnel constraints, illustrating one of the fundamental limitations of digital government: software can transmit a complaint instantaneously, but a pothole still requires a crew, an abandoned vehicle still requires an officer and a broken sink still requires somebody to physically repair it. That distinction becomes particularly relevant as San Diego continues confronting significant budget constraints across multiple departments.
There is another criticism that shows up repeatedly in Get It Done reviews: residents claiming reports were marked closed even though the underlying problem remained. The complaints span years rather than appearing to be an isolated glitch.
One reviewer wrote in 2021 that response was good for some categories and "non existent" for others, while claiming problems were sometimes marked closed despite not being corrected. Another complained in 2022 that pothole and street-sign reports were listed as fixed when nothing had happened.
In 2024, another user offered a rather less diplomatic assessment: "Write your request on a napkin and flush it down the toilet," alleging multiple reports had been marked completed without the work actually being done. The developer responded by asking for specific report numbers so City staff could investigate.
Similar criticism continues into 2026. One March reviewer complained that cases were being closed while follow-up questions sent by email went unanswered.
Those are individual user allegations rather than proof of systemic misconduct, and other reviewers report excellent outcomes. But their persistence points to an important distinction in evaluating Get It Done: a closed ticket and a solved problem are not necessarily the same thing.
The City's own FAQ helps explain some of the confusion. Reports can be marked "Referred" when responsibility belongs to another City department or an outside entity such as Caltrans or AT&T. Once a complaint leaves the Get It Done ecosystem, the platform may no longer receive updated status information, even though the resident naturally continues to view Get It Done as the place where the complaint originated.
There are also more conventional technology complaints. The current U.S. Apple App Store listing gives Get It Done just 2.9 stars out of five, based on roughly 160 ratings. The Android version has similarly received mixed reviews.
Users over the years have complained about inaccurate GPS locations, difficulty uploading photographs, crashes, missing report categories and problems entering exact addresses. Those aren't merely ancient complaints from early versions of the software. A Google Play reviewer on July 30, 2026, said the app repeatedly returned a "try later" message when attempting to upload photos.
Another recent reviewer praised the redesigned application but added an important qualifier: "Taking care of issues is yet to be seen."
Location accuracy has been another recurring source of frustration. Users have complained that map pins sometimes resolve to incorrect addresses or that the system makes it unnecessarily difficult to identify intersections and locations where there is no conventional street address. That is especially significant because precise location information is supposed to be one of Get It Done's greatest advantages.
One feature residents have repeatedly requested is greater control over their own reports. If someone reports a pile of trash and then cleans it up themselves, or another neighbor removes it before a City crew arrives, the original complaint can remain in the system unnecessarily.
A July reviewer specifically asked for the ability to upload "after" photos and close reports without waiting for a government employee to process an email. The developer's response said self-closing reports is one of Get It Done's most requested features and that an application update incorporating that capability is being developed.
The current Get It Done FAQ already allows self-closure for certain categories, including some parking and homeless outreach reports, through a link contained in the original submission email. Other reports generally require the user to reply and request closure. Expanding that ability could have a surprisingly practical impact: fewer obsolete reports occupying queues that are already overwhelmed.
The increasingly granular parks categories could also give City Hall something arguably more valuable in the long run than another complaint form: better information about how San Diego's infrastructure is deteriorating. Instead of knowing merely that a park generates many complaints, officials could identify that a particular park repeatedly experiences irrigation failures, another constantly loses restroom supplies and another has a chronic lighting or playground-equipment problem.
That data can then inform staffing, preventive maintenance and future budgets rather than leaving departments perpetually reacting to whichever complaint arrives next. It may also expose geographic disparities.
According to the City's analysis cited by the Union-Tribune, Parks & Recreation complaints since the beginning of 2025 have been heavily concentrated in Council District 2, which includes communities such as Point Loma, Ocean Beach and Clairemont, and District 3, encompassing downtown, Hillcrest and North Park. District 2 generated 3,255 complaints and District 3 generated 2,666, compared with just 664 in District 6 and the same number in District 8.
That does not necessarily mean parks in Districts 2 and 3 are dramatically worse. Reporting behavior matters. Neighborhoods with more residents familiar with Get It Done may generate substantially more data than communities where residents are less likely to use the application.
That creates another challenge for government increasingly driven by resident-generated data: the loudest dataset may not always represent the greatest need. Similar concerns have surfaced previously around the City's handling of Get It Done complaints. Axios' analysis found significant neighborhood differences in unresolved cases and response times, adding another layer to questions about whether access to City services is distributed evenly.
The contradiction at the heart of Get It Done after ten years is that both its champions and critics can be correct. It is objectively easier today for a San Diegan standing beside a broken drinking fountain to photograph it, geolocate it and transmit the problem directly into City operations than it was before Get It Done existed. Millions of reports demonstrate that residents have embraced that ability.
There are also countless documented cases of graffiti disappearing, dumped mattresses being removed, potholes being filled and hazards being repaired because somebody bothered to file a report. But no application can compensate indefinitely for insufficient maintenance crews, police staffing, park rangers, electricians, plumbers, arborists or infrastructure funding.
Adding 46 park categories will make reports better. Providing estimated repair times will make the system more transparent. QR codes may make it far easier to report dogs running through school fields. Better data may help the City determine where its limited resources are needed most. Those are all genuine improvements.
The much harder part begins after somebody taps Submit. Ten years and more than 3.5 million reports into San Diego's grand experiment in crowdsourcing municipal maintenance, the technology for telling City Hall what is broken has become remarkably sophisticated. Whether City Hall has enough people and money to actually fix it remains the considerably bigger question.
Originally published on August 11, 2026. Information first reported by David Garrick of San Diego Union-Tribune.
The contradiction at the heart of Get It Done after ten years is that both its champions and critics can be correct. It is objectively easier today for a San Diegan standing beside a broken drinking fountain to photograph it, geolocate it and transmit the problem directly into City operations than it was before Get It Done existed. Millions of reports demonstrate that residents have embraced that ability.
There are also countless documented cases of graffiti disappearing, dumped mattresses being removed, potholes being filled and hazards being repaired because somebody bothered to file a report. But no application can compensate indefinitely for insufficient maintenance crews, police staffing, park rangers, electricians, plumbers, arborists or infrastructure funding.
Adding 46 park categories will make reports better. Providing estimated repair times will make the system more transparent. QR codes may make it far easier to report dogs running through school fields. Better data may help the City determine where its limited resources are needed most. Those are all genuine improvements.
The much harder part begins after somebody taps Submit. Ten years and more than 3.5 million reports into San Diego's grand experiment in crowdsourcing municipal maintenance, the technology for telling City Hall what is broken has become remarkably sophisticated. Whether City Hall has enough people and money to actually fix it remains the considerably bigger question.
Originally published on August 11, 2026. Information first reported by David Garrick of San Diego Union-Tribune.