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Grant County moves from Code Red to Regroup after IPAWS certificate outage
Summary
Emergency management told commissioners a national IPAWS/certificate issue disrupted Code Red access; the county voted to contract Regroup to restore IPAWS capabilities, enable geo-targeted tower and desktop alerts, and reduce multiyear costs while staff imports 911 data for re-registration.
Emergency management updated the board on a recent interruption to the county’s Code Red alerting service after IPAWS certificate restrictions prevented Code Red from accessing federal tower-based alerts. The interruption meant the county could not independently send full IPAWS alerts to cell towers while the certificate issue persisted.
Staff reported a regional procurement to adopt Regroup, a vendor that can obtain IPAWS certificates and restore geotargeted tower alerting, desktop notifications and other channels. The proposed three-year Regroup contract was presented as a cost-saving measure — the multi-county agreement will cost less over three years than the county’s previous annual Code Red contract — and will restore the county’s ability to send emergency messages to all devices in a defined geographic polygon.
Under the plan, staff will import 9-1-1 address data into Regroup, place a signup link on the county website, and run public outreach to inform residents to re-register. Staff said IPAWS alerts still rely on end-user device settings (government alerts must be enabled on some phones) but that Regroup restores the county’s ability to hit towers for geographically targeted alerts and offers redundancy through partner counties.
The board approved the Regroup contract and directed staff to proceed with data imports and outreach; staff said the new service should be available to sign-ups by the end of the week.
