The City of Alameda says that certain town hall meetings organized by politicians qualify for official distribution as significant community notices. (File photo)
Notice of Assemblymember Rob Bonta’s town hall meeting at the library tomorrow is on par with a major sewer pipe rupture and eligible for distribution via the Nixle emergency alert and community notification system, a city hall official said today.
Readers wrote to Action Alameda News to ask why notice of Bonta’s town hall meeting, “to discuss current legislation and local efforts to provide children with a quality education, keep neighborhoods safe from gun violence, maintain a social safety net, and create good jobs and prosperous communities through smart economic development,” warranted distribution on the City of Alameda’s Nixle alert system, sent by the Alameda Police Department.
In late June, the City of Alameda announced the complete switchover of its reverse 9-1-1 system to Nixle, saying that it will be used to “provide instant alerts to the community for a variety of public safety events and for other significant community issues.”
In a city press release, Fire Chief Mike D’Orazi stressed that “this [Nixle] will provide community members with the important information they need, especially during emergencies.”
Apart from emergencies, the press release said that the system would be used also to send community notices, such as missing person bulletins, temporary street closures or news of a major sewer pipe rupture.
Assistant City Manager Alex Nguyen told Action Alameda News, “this town hall meeting was sent out as a community notice, NOT an emergency alert, and police sent it because there are public safety issues to be discussed at the town hall. As we ramp up our usage of Nixle, such community notices will also come from my office, or other city departments depending on the nature and subject.”
Nguyen said that the police and fire departments have the most experience with Nixle to date.
The City of Alameda isn’t showing favoritism to Bonta, a former Alameda councilmember, and would share similar announcements for Alameda County Supervisor Wilma Chan or Congresswoman Barbara Lee, he said.
The town hall meeting starts at 6:00 p.m. tomorrow, at the Alameda Free Library on Oak Street.
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Alex also wrote, “This is not advertising. They hold town hall meetings in the course of their jobs to interact with the people they represent.”
(“Advertising” was the polite term I used to describe it in place of a reader’s word: “garbage”.)
So, is Bonta’s notice of a town hall meeting “advertising” ?
Bonta had a heckler at a recent town hall…
http://www.ebcitizen.com/2014/08/san-leandro-resident-harangues-rob.html
You just can’t make people happy. They get one fairly innocuous notification about a topic they don’t think qualifies and get all worked up. These are probably the same people that would whine about not enough notification provided on any given topic.
I do like the comparison of politics and sewage though. They usually both stink.
If the emergency notification system is going to be used to send notices of general meetings (not related to an active emergency) then the system will become worthless with overuse; it will train us to ignore it. If there is an active emergency that requires a community meeting, then that is a legitimate use of the emergency notification system (eg the meetings held for communities affected by major fires)