Village of Greenfield, OH

In a recent council meeting there was discussion about the village implementing an all-call system. Will you tell us some more about that?

Yes. We are implementing an all-call service to help get information out to the community. What we need now are one primary contact phone number and one primary contact email for every household. This will ensure that we have the ability to notify all that should be notified for things, say, if there’s a boil alert. A major point of the system is to be able to reach the whole community with important information. We would also like to use this system to inform people about activities and events in the community so everyone is aware. 

Another component of this is that we will notify individuals who are late on their water/sewer payments, however, these notifications will go to the account holder. Every month there’s about 300-500 people that don’t pay their water bill on time. With this system we can let them know their bill is late and that they have until a certain date to pay the bill to avoid shutoff. Typically most folks come through before the shut-off day and get their bill paid, but there’s usually a few dozen that don’t make before that date. With this system, we will notify these folks the week of the shut-off day so that they are reminded and can take the opportunity to come in and pay their water/sewer bill before it is shut off. 

In the past, we’ve tried notifying people with door hangers of impending water shut-off, but invariably not all of them get seen because not everyone uses their front door, things like that. The all-call system, we feel, will be a better way of notifying people and will eliminate some of the stress associated with water turn offs, both from the citizen’s standpoint and the village’s. So this is a big deal and a big change, but we believe that at the end of the day, it will be an invaluable service.  

While the water/sewer bill notifications will go to person that is the account holder, all other notifications from the system regarding alerts, emergencies, and other community information will go to the primary contact information provided for the household.

We plan to roll this out by year’s end with the contact information we already have, however, we need to make sure we have everyone’s so that the whole community can benefit from the all-call system. To make sure the village has a primary contact phone number and email for your household, you can stop up on the third floor of the city building and fill out a contact information form. Citizens can also call the office to provide this information, just ask for Shawna or Jim and they can get your information put in the system. We are also looking to send out a mailer in January. 

You can reach City Manager Todd Wilkin by email at citymanager@greenfieldohio.net.