User Generated Content in Municipal Flood Mapping and Response

These two paragraphs in a story about tackling local flooding in the local paper in Niles, Illinois caught my eye.

Niles’ Acting Mayor Robert Callero has announced that the village has made strides in tackling flooding issues, discovering many “hot spots” and programming them into the village’s digital mapping system.

Callero said the village had information based on nearly 400 citizen surveys that was being used to plot stormwater data on Niles’ Geographic Information System (GIS).

Since most user generated content discussed to date focusses around crowdsourcing map data, restaurant reviews and information during emergencies, this more staid approach seemed worthy of exploration. The author of the article, Tony Bertuca
Pioneer Press, replied to my query about the nature of the survey.

In this case, the village of Niles sent our surveys to homes asking about stomrwater issues. They also made the surveys available online. Using that information, they say they’ve been able to locate some of the flooding “hot spots”. For instance, I’ve recently learned many of the people experiencing problems live near the cemetery that seems to be the cause of a lot of water run off. Citizens did not plot anything on a map, however, they just answered questions about their address and flooding problems they’ve had.
The reason they used the surveys is because many of the same people complained of flooding years after year, so it seemed like a localized problem in some neighborhoods. So, the surveys are what the new GIS stormwater map is based on. I hope this helps clarify.

My first thought: John Snow and cholera! Of course here, instead of gathering all the data himself, the village asked the residents, who knew the situation best. Is this what user generated content should mean in government GIS?