While the new City of Flin Flon website will see some further delays, more information about the project has come to light, including a dedicated phone app and an emergency alert service.
The website, which was first announced earlier this year, will not go online until October at the latest, but the new web portal is the beginning of an overhauled online presence for the City.
Treasurer Lyn Brown said the new site will include regular updates and will be released along with a special phone app with an alert system which will advise people of any major City related announcements, including road closures, emergency situations and others. The existence of the app, which does not yet have an official name, was first announced during the Sept. 17 city council meeting.
“It’s like a public alarm system, but it’s also a way to get out public notices in general,” Brown said.
“For instance, let’s say we have a water main break and it affected all of Third Avenue but nowhere else. We would be able to, utilizing that registration and that particular program, simply take our fingers and just scroll down on a touch screen to Third Avenue and the program will then make a notification and send it via either text, email or a voice recording. Every single way that people today are contacted and communicated will be set up through that.”
The overhaul of the City’s existing system of making phone calls to home addresses and sending announcements over social media is about getting the word out on important issues, Brown said.
“We just want to engage as much as we can and communicate as much as we can. In a nutshell, that’s what that position is, making sure we do that.”
