SPANISH FORT – Spanish Fort residents should soon have access to an app that will include information on city services and other content, following action by the City Council.
The council voted Monday, May 3, to allow the Xante Corporation to be the distributor of an app prepared by the city. Under the agreement, the city will provide content for the app and the company will be responsible for distributing the service on the Google platform, David Conner, city attorney, said.
The city will pay $75 a month for the service, Mayor Mike McMillan said. He said the service worked well in demonstrations by Xante.
“It’s an agreement that will be put in place,” McMillan said. “It’s $75 a month and there’s no long-term agreement. We can cut off after 30 days if we don’t like what we have. But we have seen examples in other places and been very pleased with what they have. So, we thought we’d give it a shot for $75 and see what happens.”
Councilman J.R. Smith said the city should be certain that all information on the app is controlled by Spanish Fort if the council decides to end the agreement.
City Clerk Rebecca Gaines said that if the agreement ends, the app would be discontinued, but the content would remain under the control of the city.
Councilman Curt Smith said the app would be a link to information, not a website under the control of an outside agency.
“You can’t think of it as a website that we host or a Facebook account,” Curt Smith said. “It’s more of an aggregator of all the things that we currently have and, so, the content really doesn’t live there. It just pulls from various sources into one convenient place. It’s a neat idea. It’s pretty innovative.”
