Jackson Water Crisis Online Map Dysfunctional

by Stephen McDill

Published: January 14,2010

By Stephen McDill and Amy McCullough

The city of Jackson posted an interactive map on its web site Wednesday that shows water line breaks and repairs throughout the city. But users are finding the map cumbersome to navigate, and the search box for street location does not work.

When asked about the map by the Mississippi Business Journal at an 11 a.m. city hall press conference, Mayor Harvey Johnson said: “The idea was to make it usable. If it’s not useful, then we’re gonna have to tweak it to make it useful. If you can imagine the hard copy that I saw was 48 by 60, or something like that… It was a fairly large map. To squeeze it down to where it fits on a computer screen, that’s the problem that we’re dealing with. We wanna try to get the info out to people as fast as possible so they know where the breaks are.”

In an afternoon interview city spokesman Chris Mims said he would check with the information technology people in charge of the map regarding the dysfunctional search box.

Link to City of Jackson interactive map: http://64.66.68.250/parcelsearch3/