ORDER-2020-10 : Presentation Regarding the City's Roll out of Its New Everbridge Emergency Notification System

Transcript (~23 min @ 1:02)

Speakers identified by voice; unnamed voices are numbered within this recording. Auto-caption text — verify against the video.

▶ 0:55 Shawn M. MacMaster: Okay, public comment is now closed. We have one item on our agenda this evening. It is order number 2020-10, presentation regarding the city's rollout of its new Everbridge emergency notification system.

▶ 1:10 Peter D. Mortimer: Motion to suspend the rules that we may have the presentation.

▶ 1:13 Speaker 3: Second.

▶ 1:14 Shawn M. MacMaster: Motion made by Alderman Mortimer to suspend the rules, seconded by Alderman Boycelle. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? The rules are now suspended before Mr. Ellis is called forward. I'd just like to note that Alderman Medeiros has joined us this evening. Good evening, Mr. Ellis.

▶ 1:37 Speaker 4: So I just wanted to give you kind of how we started to use it here and there

▶ 1:47 Speaker 4: for public works notifications.

▶ 1:50 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: Just point of order. I'm sorry. Is Paul going to be able to hear you over there? I'm actually not sure how it's going to work if you're not speaking to a microphone, and I want to make sure that folks watching are able to hear all right

▶ 2:11 Speaker 4: it's like I'm on stage I need a guitar all right so this is the emergency notification system we previously had an emergency notification system called code red. We found it a little clumsy to use. The user interface was not very good. It only allowed us to have a certain number of people and we had to pay more for more people. We also had to pay for a certain number of minutes to use it. The rest of the systems that are out there let everybody use it there's no you know cap on minutes and that kind

▶ 2:56 Speaker 4: of thing so we're going to use Everbridge to make sure that people know about public safety issues in community events we'll get into that the system is very feature-rich and allows citizens to opt in for certain types of notifications we'll get into that a little bit more after this so like I said we needed an urgency notification system that was a better fit with Melrose what we needed to do and how we want to inform our residents so we the current like I said the current provider that we code read that we had was more than twice the cost of this and it didn't have as many features so we formed a team to evaluate the different systems uh we had the police chief mike lyle uh fire chief ed kalina the emergency management director at the time was was ruth clay ellen alpert didn't start until just recently a few months ago we made this decision back around the turn of the year somewhere around january uh the mayor's chief of staff was jackie byrd at the time yours truly the health director also ruth clay uh director of public works john shena and the city clerk website administrator uh amy camosa and she was uh we wanted to make sure that whatever we did would be would be okay with the website um given that she does all those kind of notifications but we could you know post it once and see it a couple different places so we looked at a bunch of systems we narrowed it down to about five we really looked at those five and we narrowed it down to this the system so if you're not

▶ 4:47 Speaker 4: familiar with emergency notification systems like an ENS call it an ENS they They will send, this one will send email, phone, text message, can do several other things beyond that. It also has an app, if you would download the app. One cool thing about this system is that you can do geo, what they call geo-fencing. So if you put an alert out in a certain neighborhood, say, you know, there's an oil spill here or chemical spill this part of Melrose don't go down Upham Street and you fence it off on the map in here if anybody has that app if they drive into that geo area they will get the notification immediately even if they're not a resident of Melrose just as they have the app so you know and I a way you would use this as maybe severe weather like I said maybe a spill or some kind of emergency notification it does it instantly sends them all out at once and we would send instructions for the citizens to what they would do in the case of an emergency so these are some of the ways that you can get alerted home phone number we have loaded already from the white pages they do that for us already what we want to do is bring residents on board with cell and cell numbers and text numbers because we can reach a lot more people that way some people won't go home to check their phone messages until later in the day or the next day it's much more immediate email as well and SMS text sort of the same thing hearing impaired receiving devices and push notifications to that that app, so we can really reach people in a number of different ways. So this is some, some of these are like opt-in, and we'll get to that. So opt-in, like community events, so there's a, there's a feature in this whereby you could get the, and I'm going to show the link at the very end, a link that you go on to, anybody who's a Melrose resident, even people who aren't Melrose residents can go in put their number in put their email in anything whatever they prefer to be contacted you can say oh I'd like to be contacted through email or through text or whatever and in there you can pick a category really really have to right now which is emergency notifications and in road I mean road closures traffic and community events so So those are, you know, if you want to know. We can also build some for like, say we have an upcoming event that people might want to know about. We can build that category in there and, you know, we can take it down later. We also have this thing called community engagement whereby you can text a word, you can make up a word and people can text it to the phone number and then they can immediately be signed up for those those community events so if you want we do like the Victorian Fair say next year we can have a Victorian Fair thing say you want to know about the Victorian Fair text this to this number and then they would get all the Victorian Fair notifications for that year we can also use it internally

▶ 8:29 Speaker 4: for groups of contacts we want to notify you know if there's a inclement weather closure of City Hall we can let our employees know we can also build groups for veterans retirees those are just some examples different groups that we might want to keep contact with yeah we form groups based on geographic area which we're doing right now actually we're doing the water flushing the DPW is doing water flushing right now and we've we've set we've fenced off pieces of Melrose to notify just the people in those areas so they know about the flushing in their neighborhood or in nearby nearby streets we've done about

▶ 9:20 Speaker 4: three of those now so we've written a policy that governs the ENS very important to have a policy that governs anything that you do with communication something like this it's like five pages this is going to be incorporated into a larger emergency response plan so when Alan Alpert's working on that plan we also have hazard mitigation plan that the engineering department did that came out in June and one of the things in that is is you know better communication with residents we're trying to reach those goals why should you sign up if

▶ 9:58 Speaker 4: you're watching at home why should you sign up because if you don't sign up then you might not be able we might not be able to contact you in an emergency because you might not have a home phone so we don't have you in our database right now we need to have your cell phone we need to have your email or text whatever you want to get notified in case there's an emergency community events it's an opt-in thing if you want to be keep in touch with community events we also there's also the ability to say you have a parent that you you you help or keep an eye on who lives in a different part of town you can put their address in to your account so you can get notified if they something falls within their range a street closure or something you can get notified of it so

▶ 10:58 Speaker 4: you can take care of that or at your work location if you work in Melrose you can do this and download it and put your address of your work in there and you

▶ 11:09 Speaker 4: can get notified for things as well so the website to go to to sign up is city of Melrose dot org slash alerts that will give you a link to go to the Everbridge sign up that we have set up for Melrose and it'll walk you through how to sign up you can also text alert Melrose to this number so if you're at home that's alert Melrose all one word and you can text it to 888 777 and that will send you a link you can click on the link and in your either on your computer or on your phone if you click on the link in your phone it'll bring up the Everbridge app and you can set it up on your phone we also have signup materials we're going to put at different places around town City Hall Public Works Council on Aging and you can also just go to the Google Play or Apple iTunes it's not the iTunes Store anymore but it's the Apple App Store and get the Everbridge app and then just plug in our zip code and that will bring

▶ 12:22 Speaker 4: up the sign up for Melrose that's the end does anyone have any questions Thank

▶ 12:25 Shawn M. MacMaster: Mr. Ellis. Any questions from the committee? Alderman Lipper-Garabedian.

▶ 12:42 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: Sure. So thanks for the presentation and it's nice that it's up online for anybody to be able to access. The hyperlink even works for going to register so that's great. I'm just interested in the process you said you looked at a bunch you narrowed it down to five and then you selected this one. was there a request for proposals that was put out was this part of a procurement how did that work

▶ 13:09 Speaker 4: so there were no uh there were no emergency notification systems on the state contract there none of them sure are on the contract uh it was it was under ten thousand dollars so it was basically we wanted to find what was the best fit for us they all fell within the same pretty much the same price because they're all competitive competing even the company that we had prior knocked their price down nine thousand dollars because they knew that we were going to have um prices that were far less than theirs so so in other words because of the threshold

▶ 13:42 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: amount and the contract um the city wasn't um obligated to go out to bid for this correct

▶ 13:52 Speaker 4: okay right but we did we did do our due diligence and got prices price was a factor sure so we uh did look at price across the board of all the all the ones that we looked at so

▶ 14:04 Speaker 1: okay and um i think that's all that i have thank you sure any voting members of the committee have

▶ 14:16 Manisha Bewtra: questions hold them in future thank you uh thanks for your presentation um so this is seems like a really great way of getting information out to residents and then i think we also have like for example see click fix to get information to us and i'm curious if there's a way for those two programs to integrate or how from i guess like your end or the city's end you can use

▶ 14:41 Speaker 4: those two systems together we can to some extent we with I mean I with see click fix you can is mostly goes directly to DPW if I mean the only thing I can think of is maybe if they were something gets reported and then it comes in through see quick fix and the DPW in word it finds it's something they got to do right away and they would send out a notification through the system wouldn't be automatic or anything like that but we could we could do a thing say if there's a construction project in an area and people want to get updates you know relatively quickly and often like I said we can make up we can make a a little tagline like um i don't know what it would mean florence street is getting worked on florence florence street to 888-777 and people would get notifications for those got it um well

▶ 15:44 Manisha Bewtra: the part one of the things that made me think of it yes um was like yesterday there were areas of the city that had flash flood flooding during that storm and um so it made me think of well if you're a resident and you see something can you report things to the city quickly um just as much as we're getting alerts from the city um through this ens system so right just a thought for

▶ 16:16 Monica C. Medeiros: i don't know future yeah thank you sure thanks alderman Medeiros thank you uh just to sort of go on that thought i mean i think we could probably use this app it sounds like or the system to suggest to people that if you know it was pothole season to remind them they could use cyclic fix to report potholes or something like like that but um my questions were really more

▶ 16:40 Speaker 4: about uh the cost again how much does this system cost uh this system was 6700 uh per year and

▶ 16:45 Monica C. Medeiros: and that was in comparison to the code reg system which was how much ah geez i don't i don't have

▶ 16:51 Speaker 4: all the all of them in front of me yeah this the the the base system for ever bridge is actually lower the the we did purchase the additional module which is the ability to do the texting to that number and get for people to opt in and

▶ 17:19 Monica C. Medeiros: so the old system it had if you were being charged per communication and this is a flat fee is that correct so we can send out as many notifications as we want to as many people

▶ 17:29 Speaker 4: as we want right we don't want to overuse it because then we won't don't have people right exactly but um you know it it might be some a good practice maybe if we start to say okay um there's a snow emergency um you know somebody should send out a thing about no park street parking for whatever because there's plowing or snow removal okay and um how about i'm you know

▶ 17:52 Monica C. Medeiros: concerned about the the privacy of this information for our residents as if they opt in um what kind of expectation of privacy do they have for will their cell phone numbers be shared oh yeah no no

▶ 18:08 Speaker 4: that's a really good point no no uh none of the in fact everbridge is is very that's one of their they're there they say right up front and in this isn't the case with all emergency notification systems that we own the data it's ours they don't take anything that's in there and reuse it for any purpose whatsoever and we don't either I mean we wouldn't take any of that information and give it to anyone

▶ 18:47 Speaker 4: yeah even even through even yeah I mean I would have to I'd have to check with mr. van Kampen about what the what the rules around that are

▶ 19:02 Monica C. Medeiros: is this included in the policy that that you've created the the privacy issues of

▶ 19:07 Speaker 4: the information uh sharing it actually isn't but we could add that i would i would definitely

▶ 19:14 Monica C. Medeiros: recommend adding you could definitely do that protections there and clearly delineating that we'd consider this to be personal sure yeah it's a good idea thank you all right call them invoice

▶ 19:24 Robert A. Boisselle: oh did you say the total cost was sixty seven hundred dollars yeah there's no licensing

▶ 19:31 Speaker 4: requirements or nope per month or per year no it's a it's an online it's an online basically software as a service so it's you know it's it's a it's a website we go in and out of and

▶ 19:43 Robert A. Boisselle: um you know administer online now do they do they offer you said you you got some extra packages uh do they offer these packages at a cost or yeah so actually after i said that i i just thought

▶ 19:51 Speaker 4: that they gave us they gave us the community engagement for free uh they they do offer um other things at a cost uh there is another package that's uh basically the they have a a database of cell phones that they have for the area for melrose and they can for another whatever cost they can take their database you basically buy the database information they can

▶ 20:27 Robert A. Boisselle: feed it into your ever rich so basically the package is a la carte you if you want something else you'll cost you that right they sell a lot of different software is there a charge for installation or does do they is it automatically upgraded there was a setup fee i don't remember

▶ 20:42 Speaker 4: what that was uh and that that had uh us setting up working with us to set it up the way that we want it going through all the training for myself and a couple of key people

▶ 21:03 Speaker 4: and some now that we didn't really help us import but yeah some of the because it's very feature rich so you really got to drill down through all of the things we had like five different

▶ 21:14 Speaker 3: trainings so okay all right thank you thank you mr chair alderman lippi garabedian sure i'm sorry

▶ 21:19 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: i'm just circling back on my question earlier because i i'm not a procurement expert but i do I assist with procurement in my day job and I was looking up our policy on procurement and just noticing the $10,000 threshold is noted but typically that's for a one-time expense something that you're not anticipating paying year after year after year because at that point it becomes something a more substantial value and maybe different maybe the thresholds are different are the requirements for municipalities for procurement are certainly different from the state government but it's just something I'd be curious on maybe you following up with us about because this does seem like the kind of thing that presumably we'd like to not have to switch providers every year and that we could anticipate continuing to use Everbridge in years to come and so then it becomes more than just $10,000 it's an ongoing contractual relationship so maybe if you don't mind just checking in and following up with us I'd appreciate that yeah so what's just the decision that we didn't have to go out do you didn't have to post this as an opportunity to receive formal proposals and go through a formal procurement process as opposed to selecting and then reaching out and right engaging this particular provider well we we did get

▶ 22:32 Speaker 4: three quotes from three different providers so under fifty thousand we should be fine with with three in the in the in the state also has a under 30 B has a has a provision whereby no no company can renew auto renew a year after year okay and because of that technically they we have to re sign yearly

▶ 23:06 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: and actually you just mentioned you've got three quotes which suggests that there was an invitation to bed so perhaps yeah my apologies it sounded to me originally when you described this as sort of you all took a look at what was publicly available and then reached out to Everbridge and said we'd like to oh

▶ 23:21 Speaker 4: no no we we actually got quotes from all of them you know with as a as a paper look can you send me your quote for for the emergency notification no no we did we did do a get three quotes okay yes thank you yeah that's all I have any

▶ 23:38 Peter D. Mortimer: other questions what is the will of the committee motion to place motion to make a recommendation to place this order on file second alderman mortimer has made a motion to