Sunday, October 31, 2010
By ADRIENNE BISH
TheNewsOutlet.org
Youngstown
The city has spent more than $32,000 for an emergency neighborhood-watch system that hasn’t worked properly for more than a year.
That doesn’t include the $6,300 a year spent to maintain it, and that has frustrated some city residents and officials.
The City Watch System should send messages to the telephone numbers of block-watch group members when there is an emergency or a block-watch or town meeting.
But for Phil Kidd, president of Wick Park Neighborhood Association, the system sent out messages to Struthers’ residents when he tried to notify people in his North Side block watch group about a meeting.
“The calls didn’t go to people in my neighborhood. They were going to senior citizens in Struthers, and they in turn were calling the Better Business Bureau,” Kidd said.
But the calls didn’t stop once the system was activated. Calls from the automated system kept going to Struthers’ residents.
For the residents of the Newport Neighborhood Association, the repeated phone messages from the failed system were too much. The block watch group decided to stop using it all together.
“We really need to move on. We can’t wait for them to fix it,” said Paul Heine, a member of the Newport Neighborhood Association.
Most frustrated of all is Police Chief Jimmy Hughes.
Hughes said there has not been one year since 1997 that the police department has not experienced a problem with the City Watch System.
Read the full story Monday in The Vindicator and on Vindy.com.