BLAINE, Minn. – (May 12, 2017) – The city of Blaine has launched a new website. A key component of the new site is a feature called Blaine Connect. It offers residents three different information portals. The first is called Civic Ready.
“Civic Ready is our emergency communication system.” said Heidi Andrea web coordinator for the City of Blaine. “It was brought on board as a result of the water outage because residents were looking for more communication than we were providing, so what this offers is that telephone piece, that home calling piece that people were looking for, similar to what the school districts might do.”
Residents can sign up to receive Civic Ready alerts via phone, text or email. You can sign up for the free alerts on Blaine’s website. In an effort to make the alerts available to everyone residents can also sign up in person at city hall.
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“If someone doesn’t have access to a computer, we do have an option where someone can come into city hall and they can fill out a form that we have available at our receptionist counter,” said Andrea.
Other information portals offer residents a chance to report crime and be notified about upcoming community events.
“Another layer was the Tip 411 piece and it’s actually an anonymous tip line for the police department. You can choose to send in information that maybe you see something happening out in the public and you want to give the police a tip on that particular information, the police in turn can communicate with you if you choose to and you want to give your information or they’ll just take the tip and they will act on it if need be. The other piece of it is “Notify Me” that actually came along with our new website roll out and that’s more for city calendar events, regular news items, just general things that you’d want to keep up to date on, we have a construction updates section as well,” explained Andrea.
While the work on a new city website started more than a year ago, the enhanced communication efforts are a result of feedback received from residents during the water outages earlier this year.
“When we first looked into changing the website it was to streamline our communication processes and try to connect with Facebook and Twitter and Next Door all at the same time versus you know, this separation, and then, even though the water outage isn’t something that was desirable, it actually showed us that we needed that extra piece which is that communicating through your telephone for those people who don’t have access to the web and other social media,” said Andrea.
