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Stevens County rolls out Regroup emergency-alert system after vendor cyber incident
Summary
Stevens County officials briefed the board on replacing their previous IPAWS partner with Regroup, citing a cyber incident that cut certificate sharing with FEMA, estimated three-year savings above $10,000, and a Dec. 2–3 launch with about 3,500 registrants to date.
Stevens County officials told commissioners they have moved the county’s emergency notification system to Regroup after the previous vendor lost FEMA certificate access following a late-2025 cyber incident. Donna Greiner, who briefed the board, said the county worked with Sheriff Dingman to terminate the older contract and set up a multi-county Regroup deployment with Swift, Polk, Grant and Traverse counties to lower costs and improve interoperability.
Greiner said the three-year Regroup contract will save the county “over $10,000,” and staff began entering contact data and building the database before launching notifications around Dec. 2–3. Working with FEMA required a new certificate, which delayed some early alerts, but Greiner told the board, “We’re all up and running now.”
The system includes automatic translation into ‘‘up to or over 60 different languages’’ and can require an acknowledgment from recipients for certain incidents, she said. Greiner advised residents to save the county’s alert caller ID (listed on the county handout) and said registration is available from the county website; she reported about 3,500 individuals now in the system and 1,078 registrations since Dec. 2, with the county supplementing that total by importing and cleaning its 911 database.
Greiner described several operational features that officials said factored into the decision: per‑county views so each county can see only its registrants, a shared multi-county architecture so counties can send alerts on behalf of another if requested, desktop authority seats purchased for administrators, and the ability to create county-specific groups for hospitals, schools and emergency services at no additional cost to Stevens County.
No formal board action was required or recorded for the vendor switch during the meeting; commissioners asked follow-up questions about confirming individual registrations and workplace numbers, and Greiner said she would check registrations and follow up with callers. She also said administrators would schedule a system test and invite commissioners to monitor alerts when the test date is set.
