STARKVILLE — The city will soon implement a mass communication system that can inform citizens about everything from emergencies to special events to road closures and utility work.
Citizens can curate what messages they want from the city through this system, if any.
At Friday’s board of aldermen work session, city technology director Joel Clements said the CivicReady system, which will be implemented by mid-April, sends notifications to city residents through a mobile app, text messages, emails and text-to-speech calls. Once the service is active, citizens can sign up via text or on the city’s website.
“We had a rudimentary system that was included with our original website that was deployed a decade or so ago, but this one makes it pale in comparison,” Clements told The Dispatch after the meeting.
Every city department will have access to CivicReady to send notifications to residents who have opted into the program.
One benefit of CivicReady over the old system is speed, Clements said. CivicReady can send out 12,000 text-to-speech messages per minute, 60,000 SMS messages per minute and 50,000 emails per minute in more than 10 languages.
“We want to empower those departments to communicate regularly and timely information and to have access to this in a very easy way,” Clements said. “This also sends the information out very quickly.”
Clements said this could be particularly useful for the police and fire departments, as well as other emergency notifications.
CivicReady also uses geo-targeted messages. If citizens provide their physical address to the system, the system can send them notifications about their specific neighborhood.
“You can go into the interface and draw a line around the neighborhood that is affected, or draw a circular radius, if you don’t want to spam everybody in town, or everybody who signed up for this, and it’s not something that they’d want to know about,” Clements said.
Clements said the system does not track an individual’s physical location, and residents are not required to opt-in for geo-targeting for their address to use CivicReady.
The mayor and board of aldermen placed purchasing the CivicReady service from CivicPlus on the consent agenda for Tuesday’s regular meeting. That means it won’t officially be approved until Tuesday, but it is slated to be rubber-stamped without further discussion.
It will cost $8,024.74 for the first year and $11,234.64 each subsequent year.
On Friday, City Planner Daniel Havelin also updated the board on an interactive map of the city that has recently been added to the city website for public use.
This map, accessible through the homepage of cityofstarkville.org, contains information on roads, parks, fire departments, parcels, zoning districts, wards, contours, creeks, wetlands, watersheds and flood hazards. It includes information provided by both the city and Oktibbeha County.
“This is our initial catch-all map. We’re trying to show as much information as possible,” Havelin said. “Later on, we’re going to break out more specific maps about specific topics, like historic preservation.”
Ward 2 Alderwoman Sandra Sistrunk raised an issue about the map as it currently stands.
“You and I have talked about this before,” Sistrunk said. “One of the limitations of this right now is that the Oktibbeha County information is slow to update.”
Havelin said Oktibbeha County tends to send updates yearly, but the city’s interactive map is updated as quickly as information is available.
Mayor Lynn Spruill commented that the interactive map is “neat.”
“I used it this morning,” Spruill said. “I was looking on the agenda for where we were going to be doing dilapidated structures, and I wanted to see what wards they were in. … So I looked up 725 South Jackson, and I pulled it up with the overlay and the ward overlay.”
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