City Considers New Public Notifier System

The next time a water main breaks in St. Charles, the city may have the ability to send out a targeted alert to just those residents who are impacted by the break.

The city is planning to purchase a public communicator system which will help them reach more residents and select which residents receive the message.
St. Charles City Council approved spending $15,000 in council directives to purchase a public notifier system.

These systems take 911 data from the telecommunications company which has phone numbers and addresses attached and allows the city to make geographically targeted phone calls.

"If some kind of crisis happens in an area, we can highlight those areas and it makes the phone call with whatever message we have recorded," said Matthew Seeds, St. Charles Director of Information Technology.

The city currently is using a vendor that does automated phone calls, but has a poor list of resident phone numbers, taken from Allied Waste, the city's trash hauler.

The recent major water main break in September revealed the holes in that system as many people complained about not having received a call. People who live in apartment complexes and people who have newly moved into the city weren't on the list, Seeds said.

Seeds expected the city to go out for bids on a new public notifier system this fall and have it up and running by the end of the year.

Initially, St. Charles will have access to every landline phone number in the city. Residents will also be able to add their cell phone numbers and email addresses to the registry and choose which types of events they'd like to be notified about.