City Of Highland Communication Discussion

After the City-wide boil order last month, we received a lot of questions about how to either get information from the city or how to contact the city as a citizen. Hopefully this article helps explain ways our citizens can both receive information and contact the city with any concerns or requests.

One of the first questions we got was why we no longer use Code Red. Code Red still exists but is operated by the County Emergency Management Agency and is primarily used as a disaster or severe weather alert system. Code Red is limited in its usefulness because it requires the citizen to sign up and maintain an account. We started implementing new communication methods after a water main break where the Code Red System only had 2 phone numbers for about 25 residences.

After that incident, we started looking for new ways to communicate with our citizens and we have implemented several options. Let’s start with our website, www.highlandil.gov.

When you go to our website, in the top right-hand side there is an icon for “Take Action”. From this option citizens can submit a FOIA request; request a service or provide a comment to the city; pay a city bill; view boards and commissions; access more information about each department; or see our facility directory. Any of the communications or requests that are submitted from the take action page are sent directly to the departments for response.

Also from our home page, as you scroll down to the center of our page you can see information on our Highland Happenings App. This application can be downloaded on smartphones, both Apple and Android, from their respective App stores. For citizens using the app, they have just about all the options they have from our website, such as requesting services or paying a bill or most importantly, citizens can sign up for push notifications for any city service interruptions such as power outages, boil orders or road closures; public safety announcements from the Public Safety Divisions; or general news announcements from the City about special events, road closures, meetings, Parks and Rec announcements, etc. The notifications are fully customizable so the citizen can choose as many or as few as they are interested in or wish to receive. For smartphone users, this free app is the most convenient way to receive information from the City.

For our citizens who don’t use smartphones or perhaps aren’t as tech savvy, from our homepage, if you continue scrolling to the bottom of our webpage you will see an option for “E-notifications”. From this part of our website, citizens can sign up for either email or text alerts from 10 different options from power outages and boil orders to meeting notices, job alerts and city bid notifications. Again, the options for what notices someone receives is fully customizable by the citizen, so they only get the notices they want to receive.

Those are the best options for receiving information. So how do citizens communicate information to the City?

I mentioned above that citizens can send requests and comments through both the “Take Action” icon on our website, or through the Highland Happenings App. Phone options are still the same 618-654-9891 number for City Hall and all other city services. To quickly report a power outage, that number is 618-654-9891 Option 2 and then follow the prompts.

The police department number is still 618-654-2131 and for non-emergency calls you would press 1 to speak with a dispatcher. Because citizens are used to calling the police department for power outages, we have put in an option from the police department number directly to the dispatch center that monitors our power outage response. That number is 618-654-2131, Option 7, this takes the citizen directly to the dispatcher who will notify the electric crews of the outage.

We have purchased magnets with these numbers on them that we can pass out that folks can put on their refrigerators or by their phones, so they have access to these non-emergency numbers when the time comes. As always, if a citizen has an emergency, call 911 and police, fire or EMS will be sent.