The City of Rosemount has been discussing the need for a better website to improve citizen access to city services for some time, and the City Council approved to authorize a contract with web hosting service CivicPlus Tuesday.

Communications Coordinator Alan Cox spent much of 2011 researching different options the City of Rosemount has for embracing those technology initiatives and presented the best option, a contract with CivicPlus, to the City Council Tuesday evening.

"For much of the past year I've been researching ways to improve the city's website," Cox said.

CivicPlus will provide the interface to create content, and:

• Continually allow for new modules
• Apps for smartphones and iPhones
• Alerts (in case the city needs to get an urgent message out to residents)
• Ability to customize the homepage
• Live video webstreaming
• Online permitting
• Collecting online payments

"Not all [the options that CivicPlus has to offer] are necessarily ones that we would follow," Cox said. "[But], they [do] offer us a much more robust platform."

Councilman Matt Kearney thanked Cox for his hard work and said, "I think it'll be a great enhancement for our city and citizens."

Kearney was most excited about the smartphone apps and residents being able to fill out applications and forms online.

Councilman Mark Debettignies said, "Some of the exciting things for me is that citizens can communicate [through the website] with city staff." 

He also liked the site's easy flow, and the city's ability to collect some payments online.

The net cost of the website would be $23,000 for the first year and then "negative by a few dollars the next year." According to Cox, "It is a large upfront cost but in the longterm it's highly comparable [to other companies]." The money for the site would partly come from administration and communications funds and partly from 2011 council funds.

"There would be no impact on the 2012 budget," Cox assured.

Cox estimated the site would make its redesigned debut sometime mid-summer "hopefully, before Leprechaun Days."

The City of Rosemount first had its presence on the Web in 1997 with a site at www.rosemountmn.com. A few years later, the city chose to go with a new vendor, GovOffice, which had a partnership with the League of Minnesota Cities "to serve as an affordable choice for content management and web hosting for local government, especially for entities too small to have a dedicated staff for web operations," according to Cox. 

The city had a partial web design take place in 2005, but nothing too substantial. With a GovOffice website, the city has noticed "design limitations, lack of live video streaming, required reliance on outside solutions for e-commercing transactions, limited scalability for new potential services, limited functuionality for smartphones and tablets, limited interactive ability with residents and an uneven record of updates and improvements," according to Cox. 

Due to the above limitations, staff began investigating other solutions.

Editor's Note: Mayor Bill Droste was not present at the meeting. Councilman Mark Debettignies served as vice-mayor at Tuesday's meeting.