The City of Moss Point App Puts City Hall in Your Pocket
Mayor Billy Knight Sr. and Jesse James walk through the free city app on The River City Chat, from ward alerts to Report an Issue and the events calendar.
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The City of Moss Point app is free on the App Store and Google Play, and it brings city alerts, Report an Issue, the community calendar, and city news together in one place on your phone. In a new episode of The River City Chat, Mayor Billy Knight Sr. sits down with Jesse James, the City’s media coordinator, to explain why the app was built and how every resident can put it to work.
The full conversation runs just under ten minutes, and you can watch all of it right here.
Why the Mayor wanted an alert on every phone
The idea goes back to Juneteenth 2023, when a tornado came through Moss Point. The National Weather Service rated it an EF-2 with winds up to 130 miles per hour, and WLOX reported that more than 300 structures were damaged in the six minutes it was on the ground.
Mayor Knight remembers getting about 20 to 25 minutes of warning from the fire chief that a storm system was in the area, but the City had no way to reach every resident at once, because Moss Point does not have a siren system. With a way to send that warning straight to every phone, he says, residents “would have had 20, 25 minutes to get out of harm’s way.”
Those 20 minutes stayed with him, and they shaped the City of Moss Point app from the start. City department heads and members of the Board of Aldermen are already using it after a training session with Jesse, and now the Mayor is asking every resident to download it too.
How to get the City of Moss Point app
Open the App Store on an iPhone or Google Play on an Android phone, search for City of Moss Point, and install the app, which is free and has no ads. The first thing it asks for is permission to send notifications, and Jesse’s advice is to say yes, “because without the notifications, we can’t get the information to you.”
Next, open Services and tap Find My Ward, then type your street address, and the app will show you your ward and your alderman. One more tap on Set as my ward for alerts makes sure you hear about the notices meant for your part of town, and the app checks your address against the City’s official ward boundaries without saving it.
On an iPhone, the app will also ask once whether City emergencies may sound even when your phone is silenced. Allow it, because that is how an emergency alert from the City, such as a tornado warning, can still wake you at 2 AM with the ringer off, and on Android phones the same setting is already turned on.
Alerts for the whole city, your ward, and your street
City alerts are the reason the app exists, and the City can send one to everyone in Moss Point or only to a single ward. Each alert can mark the streets it covers on a map, so a boil water notice for one neighborhood goes to that ward, plus anyone who has not picked a ward yet, instead of to every phone in town.
Alerts cover boil water notices, water main breaks, severe weather, road closures, and emergency updates, and emergencies use a different sound so you know when it matters. Aldermen can send notices to the residents of their own wards, and the Home screen also shows any watch or warning that the National Weather Service office in New Orleans and Baton Rouge has issued for Moss Point.
Report an Issue, where your eyes become our eyes
Jesse names Report an Issue as one of his two favorite features, right alongside the alerts. If you spot a pothole, a light that is out, a clogged drain, or trash where it should not be, you can choose what kind of problem it is, add photos, use your phone’s location, and send it in from wherever you are.
Each report goes to the department that handles that kind of problem and to the alderman for that ward, and you can follow it under My Reports, with a notification the moment its status changes. “We can’t be everywhere all the time,” Jesse says, and the Mayor puts it this way: “Your eyes will become our eyes.”
Not every problem can be fixed within a day or two, so Jesse asks for a little patience while the departments work through them. If two weeks pass and the problem is still there, send the same report again from the same email or phone number, and the system will flag it to the department as a repeat, which also works through the City’s online Report an Issue form.
Events, city news, and the Mayor’s show
The community calendar lives in the app as well, from Movies in the Park to Board of Aldermen meetings, and any event can become a reminder or go straight onto your phone’s calendar with one tap. The same events are on the City’s community calendar website for anyone at a computer.
City news comes through the app too, so an article like the recent notices about the CDBG public meetings shows up there the same day it is posted. The River City Chat plays right on the Home screen, and under Account, in Notification settings, you can choose to hear about city news, new events, and new job openings as they are posted.
Weather, the rivers, and 125 years of history
The Home screen opens with the local forecast and live readings from two U.S. Geological Survey river gauges, one on the Escatawpa at Interstate 10 near Orange Grove and one on the Pascagoula at Graham Ferry. When a storm is coming, that means you can check where the water stands without driving out to look.
The app also carries the City’s narrated history tour, The Story of Moss Point, which walks chapter by chapter through 125 years of The River City with photographs from the archives. Download it once and it plays anywhere, even without a signal, and the same tour is waiting on the History Tour page of the City’s website.
City Hall services in one place
The rest of City Hall sits under Services, where you can browse open City jobs and apply from your phone with your resume, pay your water bill, look up trash pickup and utility information, and call any City department with a single tap.
As the Mayor said at the close of the episode, “We’re all in this together.” Download the app, turn on notifications, and set your ward, so the next time something needs fixing or the City needs to reach you in a hurry, you are only one tap away.
To stay up to date on news from the City, download the City of Moss Point app on the App Store or Google Play.
This post was brought to you by Experienced Results, your Gulf Coast partner in digital marketing and community growth.
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