Public Safety Committee - Regular Meeting

like to welcome everybody to the public safety committee meeting for May the 12th. I'm Terry Goodwin, chair of public safety. You want to go around the room and introduce yourself? I'm Jana Garton, vice chair of public safety. Joshua Morrison, assistant chief. George Edwards, fire chief. Jesse Echenro, chief of operations. Jason Ols, IT. Jim Jones, HPD. Don Ward, Alderman Ward, too. J Rbeck, Economic Development, Matthew Cole, VP, Airfield Firefighters Association, Chris Gagman, Police Lieutenant. Do I have a motion to accept the agenda? So move. All in favor? I

Do I have an approval for the April 14th meeting minutes? So move. Second. All in favor? I. We don't have anyone signed up for citizen comments. We don't have many ordinances resolution. The only thing on the agenda is a review of the code red. Would you like to help with that, Mr. Ekenroth?

Yeah. So, currently we are subscribed to code red and we have many people in the city who are subscribed to that. Um, and what it does is when there's weather alerts, it'll alert supposed to alert you through code red or we can use it to issue alerts to residents for road closures. Um, we can use it for array of things. So, typically it's been any type of public safety concern or issue that we have, we'll shoot out a code red. Uh the weather alerts are autogenerated. When the National Weather Service uh kind of puts out a they put out a polygon area, it should flow through Code Red and alert the people like a tornado warning that are in that area. Uh Code Red has it had a a data breach a little while ago, so they switched onto a new platform, and the new platform just hasn't been consistent for us. the last couple weather alerts didn't go out to everyone on the platform. So, we have been researching a a product through Civic Plus. So, Civic Plus offers a similar messaging service and Civic Plus is the company that does our website. So, Civic Plus platform would integrate into our website. So, when you go up and you sign up for things on our website, this would just be one of those things you could also sign up for. So from uh a management perspective for us, it seems it seems like uh Civic Plus is a really easy selection because it integrates into the software we currently have. Right now Code Red is managed through the county and then we're kind of like a subreient of the code red. They they have oversight management of it. Uh so one of the considerations of going off of code red into on our own civic plus platform is that we would be managing our program exclusively. We would have

any kind of county oversight. Uh we could partner with the county to issue joint statements out like if the county wants to put something out countywide, you know, we could request that they send us that information. I can't recall in the last two years that anything has been sent out that was a countywide type of message. The only kind of countywide things that go out typically are weather and weather is autogenerated from National Weather Service. So, u that's kind of some of the risk assessment Casey and I have been considering if there's any if there's any downsite that's coming off of a a countywide system. Uh

are we under contract with Code Red? until we have like a subscription just just until August. So at August is our renewal date. We've checked prices with Civic Plus. So we're in that we're in that phase of checking prices right now. It seems to be pretty comparable. Uh so I think we're trying to work out some like kind of last minute details on pricing, but it's very similar and it integrates better into our system. Um and and Code Red just has not been consistent for residents. So you can get back with us when we

Yeah. I I I don't know. I think one of the things we kind of wanted to discuss was, you know, I think if we get off the county system, uh I don't know of any real con of getting off the county system so long as if the county sends out messages they that they want us to push out to, they just email that to us or contact us and we can push it through our system. So, I don't know if anyone has ever gotten a like countywide message. Casey and I can't remember the time anytime we've ever gotten one, and we just thought it would be good to maybe see if anyone else has before we switch to a completely city- managed system.

The idea of the city being able to control it a lot better. I like the idea of the city. Um, but as far as what we would push out to the county, my first question is what what does that look like? That's so an Amber Alert would be countywide or silver alert. Yeah. I mean, an Amber Alert might be statewide. Statewide. Okay. But there's not that many things that are countywide to start with. I mean, because they're typically state they're bigger than that.

Yeah. And we reached out to the county said, "Hey, we want to make sure we're not like we don't want to sign up for Civic Plus. Oops. we didn't think about this certain countywide, you know, message that went out. We're not part of it. And so I I asked, but all the data was lost. So they have no record of any countywide message being sent out within the last two years. I can't recall one. Casey can't recall those Amler alerts are statewide. Yeah. So and generated by state too, I guess, aren't they? And most of them are weather. Most of the alerts you get are weather, which are just autogenerated through National Weather Service. Well, yeah. So there's really not that many notices that would go out other than weather, amber, or silver. I'm thinking blue. They like the blue ones.

Yeah. That are like on a on a a bigger than a city. Yeah. Can city put out a countywide message without the counties sending it to us? Uh if we felt it was in the best interest, like if we knew of something and we felt it was in the best interest to push it out to the residents, yeah, we could. But we wouldn't have access to the county data. So right now people when they sign up they can sign up under a link that's like city of Hendersonville or they can sign up a link Sar County and it just depends on which website they go and they're signing up for code red is like which bucket they get put in.

When we migrate over to something different we would be able to pull the data for anybody living in Henderson within the county that's in that. So that would capture both folks that maybe signed up under the county link, but they live in Hendersonville. But then going forward, we wouldn't have anyone living outside of Hendersonville. We wouldn't have any authority or need to communicate beyond our city limits. And even so, most systems too have iPages type of listing as well, like someone who has a number that's they haven't said unlisted. That would be in there as well. So that if we had emergencies where someone maybe didn't opt in to being communicated to about trash or things like that, but we had a, you know, severe weather situation where we don't have power or something like that, we could still reach those folks that are there through the data that we get, but only within our city

that we import from the or we get from the county. Well, but there's a part of it too that we get just as a part of the system that's not something that was imported or that someone signed up for that's used for emergencies only. So that would be the IP pause or the yellow pages like unlisted numbers that's kind of communal for people to use for emergencies but they would be within our same city bound. Yeah. It is a much better idea to have the city have control of all that I think.

Yeah. And right now we pay for that service through the fire department. That's a line item. So we would probably move that to our communications um line item where we pay for our website. Just host it all there. makes sense. Um, it used to be that the fire department kind of managed the code of red, but as we used it for police and uh it just made more sense that we switch it to a central kind of uh position. That was Casey's position to put out code red um notices. So, we will if we do approve it, we will see that come out of the fire department budget and we'll put it in central services or admin services where we pay for the website as well. Anybody have any other questions?

So all this will take place August, September is when we make the change. It would take place before August. That would be the goal before August. We have to get the data. We want to get the data. So we'll have some overlap to start with, which is a good idea potentially. Yeah. And we'll have to do some communications as we transition to a platform to have people, you know, recognize that it's from a new number if they had it saved and to kind of reconfirm that they want to be in it. There's like some confirmations like in those first things we'll say, "Hey, this is the Hendersonville. Please click this link to, you know, confirm your desire to be a part of this thing." So, we'll have to do some of those communications on the front end as well.

So, all that'll happen before the subscription currently runs out and we'd be covered anyway. I think that's really nice work on the spark. Yeah, hopeful. So, how many residents do we have on grade?

So, we have a pretty large number. When I pull the total pool, it's like over 20,000, but some of those folks are um when I pull it, it doesn't really say how many were registered versus like the yellow pages type numbers. When I send a text message, which is someone that has subscribed, we're in the 13,000 range when I do a text. So there's a lot of users that signed up back when Code Red started and that was really phone call only at the time. People weren't getting texts because at the time that we took that on it was just primarily like you would get a phone call about something and so there's a large proportion of people on there that don't have an opted in for text and so there's a lot of just phone call only which is not the primary means of communication these days. So that's another reason to kind of reopen because it's just different. Most people don't want a phone call now. They prefer a text. And it also won't be surprising if the county switches off code redes too. Oh,

really? Yeah. But we won't be surprised if them or other cities switch from code to red to some other type of platform. And a lot of the cities around here use Civic Plus for their websites. So naturally, I think we'll probably see more people switch to the Civic Plus. So the inconsistencies haven't been just local to here. It's kind of widespread since the

Yeah. with the Cisco Code Red system. Yeah, I think you know since they had their issue in the fall, I think those people who were on their old system and they're trying to migrate to the new system, I think there are some issues and they're struggling with that for sure. And the nice thing about Civic Plus is because it will integrate and Jesse maybe said this. Sorry, I was a couple minutes late, but it will integrate with our website and our existing notifications and kind of like everything be really seamless. and it should also with our um app that when we roll that out, you know, for 311 and things. So, from a user standpoint, hopefully that will be very seamless and very nice for users to go that route. I think that sounds great. Anybody else?

Motion. Motion to