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Highlands approves CivicPlus website; board to pursue a town alert app for faster emergency notices
Summary
The board approved a CivicPlus premium design for a new municipal website and instructed staff to pursue a phone app for push notifications. Board members emphasized faster, clearer outage and emergency communications after recent winter power interruptions.
At its Jan. 16 workshop the Highlands Town Board approved moving forward with a CivicPlus premium website design and asked staff to continue work on a phone app that would allow the town to push urgent notifications directly to residents’ mobile devices.
Town Manager Josh Ward summarized the online platform work: the town is transitioning from Granicus to GovOS for short‑term rental and permitting tools, but historic data tracked by Granicus will need migration. Ward said GovOS began collecting data after the town’s contract with that vendor and staff are working to import older records as PDFs. Ward told the board the new CivicPlus site will take roughly 12–16 weeks to implement and noted CivicPlus owns Municode, which hosts town ordinances, creating an efficiency advantage.
The board approved the CivicPlus premium design package. Ward listed implementation costs discussed in the packet: a one‑time fee itemized in staff materials ($850) and an annual platform fee of $3,795; the town will receive a 10 percent discount on Municode services because of the CivicPlus relationship. Mayor/Chair Hoover said the recent multi‑hour outage underscored the need for faster public notices and urged moving forward without delay.
Commissioners also asked staff to explore a town alert app that residents can download; the app vendor would enable push notifications without requiring users to provide an email address. Chief Earhart (fire chief) and Ward described a planned vendor presentation to the board in February; commissioners emphasized the importance of careful design and curation of emergency alerts after national examples of misdirected or poorly‑timed alerts were noted.
Ward said staff will schedule training for multiple town staff members to manage site updates and special announcements and will continue migrating short‑term rental and permitting data to GovOS. The board approved the website purchase and directed staff to bring the app vendor to a future meeting for more detail.
Why it matters: A new website and a dedicated app are intended to centralize notices, give staff tools to post outage and emergency updates quickly, and support permitting and short‑term rental tracking ahead of the busy visitor season.
