Fair Haven residents can sign up for alerts about emergencies as well as ordinary community events, features that will also be incorporated into Red Bank’s website, officials say.
A North Jersey web design firm won approval Monday night to build an Internet site to replace Red Bank’s official government portal.
After a request for proposals drew only two vendor responses, the borough council last night awarded the gig to C3 Citizen Communication Center of Nutley, which has created similar sites for Fair Haven and Middletown, among other municipalities.
Red Bank’s new site, which officials said could be up and running in a matter
of weeks, will replace the existing site while adding new features, says Councilwoman Kathleen Horgan, who led the vendor search.
“We don’t want to keep our old site,” she says. “That’s the whole problem.”
The selection of C3 hit a speedbump in January when questions were raised about services available from competing vendors and the proprietary nature of C3’s technology, a portion of which is covered by a patent.
But at a flat rate of $2,000 a month, C3’s proposal was “much cheaper” than one submitted by MIS Sciences
of Burbank, Calif., the only other provider to submit a bid, Horgan
says. It was also “much more clearly” detailed than the MIS bid, she
says.
C3’s municipal experience and its location in New Jersey were also key, Horgan says.
C3’s technology includes a citizen-alert system that enables users to register for email notifications about everything from the availability of the latest issue of the town newsletter to sexual predator warnings and terroristic attacks.
Here’s a list of features that C3 says the site will have: Download C3 Product & Feature Outline
