Panama City launches CivicReady text alert system
BAY COUNTY, Fla. (WMBB) – CivicReady is part of Panama City's initiative to communicate more efficiently and frequently with citizens. It allows the city to geo-target specific parts of the city so they can send notices directly to areas affected.
Alert Bay, released in 2017, has similar features. It sends emergency notifications and utilities alerts to users who sign up for text alerts. But City Manager Jonathan Hayes insists CivicReady is not a duplicate service.
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'What we've done with Civic Ready and what Alert Bay does, they're really two different functions and two different purposes. We're not necessarily highlighting large broad-scale emergencies. This is more for city operations,' Panama City City Manager Jonathan Hayes said.
CivicReady will cost the city $6,000 annually to run. Hayes says the city included the cost of the communication system in the city budget.
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'It turns out that Civic Ready, a company and program that we already have a relationship with, allowed this to be an option just as an add-on. Very small fee to significantly increase the communications again with our citizens and business owners,' Hayes said.
Teams have been working on the project for more than 5 months. They will work with the city's Public Works Department to communicate updates. Once users sign up for alerts, they will begin receiving updates.
Residents can sign up for Civic Ready alerts by texting 'PanamaCity' to 38276. Citizens can also sign up for neighborhood group alerts to zero in on a specific area.
Panama City will continue posting relevant updates on their website and social media. To learn more about how to join CivicReady, click here.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Let's imagine Hasenfratz and her manufacturing sector pals, oil producers and agriculturists are all able to generate more of what the world wants for export — especially to destinations other than the U.S. All that stuff would need to get loaded into massive container ships at the ports of Vancouver, Montreal and Halifax. But the Port of Vancouver is already the largest on the North American West Coast and is handling record levels of cargo. An expansion that has been in the works since 2013 will not be completed until sometime in the 2030s. Montreal got the ball rolling on its port expansion in 2018, but it's still in progress and a long ways away. 'If you want to sell a good to another country beyond the United States, you are not doing it by truck or rail; you're doing it by port because there's an ocean in the way,' Tombe said. 'Right now, we don't have any excess port capacity that would allow us to trade much more with other countries, and in terms of a construction timeline in Vancouver, it is plausibly 20 years from start to finish.' If Canada is unable to get its goods moving, diversify its trade partners, grow exports to China, Japan, South Korea, India and so on, the U.S. is left as the only option. That is not a great position to be in when negotiating a new trade deal with Donald Trump. One option is to build ports elsewhere, such as the Arctic. There currently isn't a deepwater port to speak of there, but there's been plenty of talk of building one — some day. 'There is not just economic and productivity implications of bad federal policy around infrastructure, but national security implications,' Tombe said. Another area in need of a makeover that does not require anything more complicated and time-consuming than playing around with some accounting software datasets is tax policy. Small businesses, defined as companies with less than 500 employees, employ almost 50 per cent of the labour force. But they don't make capital investments in machinery and equipment at the same levels as Canada's G7 peers, apart from the Italians, who invest even less. A worker who lacks the latest tools is not as productive as the worker who does. Companies that retool an assembly line, upgrade laptops and arm staff with best-in-class gadgets are able to write off the expenditures over a number of years, but that 'delays the value' of the tax deductions, Tombe said. Were a company able to write off the new laptops in one fell swoop at the time of purchase, well, now we would be talking, he said, and the conversation would lead to an environment where companies are encouraged to reinvest today. 'It is a way to cut corporate taxes on new investment while maintaining corporate taxes on companies as a whole, so it's less costly than just dropping the corporate tax rate itself,' he said. That may seem an easy thing to do, and the same goes for another productivity fix that relates to Canada's secret weapon: immigrants. Walid Hejazi, an economics professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, meets a lot of them, and he said the old joke about the backseat of a taxi being the safest place to have a heart attack still holds up, though the taxi-driving doctor from abroad today is probably behind the wheel of an Uber. Hejazi, through the university, works with a group of immigrant women who all have university degrees from another country. They are smart, savvy and eager to become productive new Canadians. 'Do you know what the No. 1 job these women get offered is?' he said. 'Serving coffee at Tim Hortons.' Rotman puts the newcomers through a crash micro-business course. If successfully completed, that earns them a micro-credential from the school, which hopefully catches the eye of an artificial intelligence employment screener and gets them a face-to-face interview with another human. 'The goal here is to match the women with jobs that are more commensurate with their skills,' he said. As for being compared to the U.S., he said being neighbours has been a gift. We share the same language and customs, generally get along and find it easy to do business with one another to the extent that Canada's ho-hum productivity level has not been a handicap. But where it starts to be a big problem is when the U.S. closes for business and Canadian companies are forced to win market share abroad. 'It is relatively easy for a Canadian company to do business in the U.S., and it requires productivity at a given level,' he said. 'But to go to Europe and Asia and compete requires a much higher productivity level.' Canada may be having a productivity 'emergency,' but its productivity is improving, just at a slower rate than other countries with similar attributes. That is partly why Frances Donald gets the urge to 'vent' when she speaks about productivity, since obsessing over the numbers can obscure a more fundamental question: What kind of Canada do Canadians aspire to? 'You could conceive a plan that would mechanically boost our productivity number,' she said. 'But it wouldn't actually make the Canadian economy better for most Canadians.' For example, not all those productivity-sapping public-sector employees are administrators pushing paper around. They are also teachers, cops, wildfire fighters and doctors. Close to 20 per cent of Canadians have already ticked past age 65, and odds are that a care facility is in their future at some point. 'If I told you that we could quadruple the number of high-productivity engineers, but we dramatically reduce the number of doctors and that would result in higher productivity statistics, then you might hear Canadians say, 'Could I please pick the health-care workers over the high-productivity engineer?'' Donald said. Economists have spent a decade highlighting Canada's productivity ills, from internal trade barriers to reduced investment in the natural resource sector to an affordable housing crisis that only gets worse by the year. It is a drumbeat of doom that can overshadow what Canada has, chiefly, a highly educated population, a massive breadbasket of agricultural goods, oil and gas and critical minerals galore and plenty of room for the world's best and brightest who may be keen to sign on. 'In Canada, we don't have to ask what we are going to bake out of nothing because we already have a long list of something,' Donald said. 'Our project is to have a collective understanding of what this country has been blessed in, from things in the ground to our incredibly high level of education — spanning from goods to a blossoming services sector. Canada is not short on the ingredients to build a powerful economy; where we have fallen short is on the execution.' • Email: joconnor@
