Chesapeake City Council convened for a regular meeting on December 16, 2025, beginning with an informational briefing on the new "Safety Connect" emergency application, followed by public hearings on three land use items, several routine grant approvals and ordinance amendments, and concluding with a closed session regarding real property acquisitions.
Mr. Solis, good to see you down there. Yes, sir, Mr. Mayor. Carrie Online. Yes, sir. So one of City Council's desired outcomes is safety and security, and we have a very informative briefing on a program called Safety Connect. And I'll turn it over to uh Deputy City Manager Bob Geis to get us started. Thank you. Good evening, and uh thank you for the opportunity to brief you on one of the projects we've been working on. Bobby and I and the team have been the team has been working on for quite a few years. Um and one of the uh things we want to include is the ability to um react quickly in the event of emergency. So one of the things we're rolling out uh is what's called Safety Connect, and it is a application that will be on cities phones that allows us to uh put an SOS out if uh God forbid something unfortunate happened. So as you know, Bobby uh G uh has uh moved from OEM uh emergency management into the police department and heads our safety and security division of the police department. And with that, we'll turn it over to Bobby. All right, thank you, Mr. Geiss. Uh thank you, Mr. Mayor, Vice Mayor, uh members of council. Uh for those of you that do not know me, um excuse me, my name is Bobby Jellerman. Uh I've been with the city for 18 years, started in the fire department in 2007, uh, spent 10 years in the field, and then moved into emergency management and spent eight years with them, and then recently we added the position of the security program manager. And it went from the fire department over to the dark side to the police department. So it's been very a good a great blessing. So um, but I'm excited to uh kind of go over something that we've been working on for quite a while now. So as you all know, um we use Everbridge, that's our mass notification system. So there's two sides of Everbridge. Uh you probably know it more so as Chesspeak Alert. Um there's the employee side and the citizen side. So the citizen side obviously is Chesspeak Alert, which you can sign up for different uh notifications, and then internally on the employee side, we use it for every department can use it for different types of notifications everywhere from uh the police department uses it for call-outs, dispatch uses it for overtime, fire department uses it for uh working incident notifications, which you all should receive, you should receive those as well as the uh significant police notifications. Well, we wanted to take it a step further uh and bring an awareness and bring the ability to uh allow employees to notify us if they're in an uh emergent situation. So that's what I wanted to kind of talk to you all about today. Uh just real quick, so the purpose just to go over to introduce the application to you all, talk about some of the features, uh, and then talk about the instruction on the use of the app and then the rollout what we're doing for our employees. So under the scope, so every city uh cell phone, uh whether it be a city issued phone or if you receive the city stipend will automatically receive the app. Uh it'll be downloaded uh by IT to the device. And then all city employees that have a personal cell phone will be offered the opportunity to download the app to their uh personal cell phone. Um one of the major requirements that we're gonna ask all city employees is that and we you know we've been doing this for a couple of years now is that employees keep their information, their contact information uh updated in ESS of the employee self-service. You know, that's our way of of getting uh information out to them, uh making sure that if they do have a cell phone that it's listed uh in the portal so that we can make contact with them. Now, obviously some employees are not gonna want to uh download the app, and that's totally their choice. This is another tool in the toolbox, it's just uh another way of um keeping them safe. But if they do not wish to download the app, they'll be required to sign a waiver acknowledging that they've been offered the use of the app. And then most importantly, we'll have training uh on the app and how to use it and when to use it. So the purpose of the app is to be used really only in the event uh of emergency. And it limits the abilities, the employees' ability to dial 911. As you will see in front, kind of some screenshots of what the app looks like. Now, one thing that's uh important to know is as an employee that lives in the city that they can use the Everbridge app for both uh citizen notifications and employee notifications. So if you have the if you see the if you look at the pictures in front, that middle uh screenshot, you can see there's two different logos. So there's the uh Chesapeake Citizen Alerts and then the uh all employee uh alerts. So that is the one that is a nice amenity of the of having the app, especially if you do live in the city that you can get dual notifications. Uh and then there's the a major difference will be notification versus incident. So any type of SOS is triggered, that's considered an incident.