Madison County launches app to put county services in residents’ hands

Madison County has released a free smartphone app that puts everything from burn ban alerts to inmate searches to dump station maps in one place.

The app, available in the App Store and Google Play by searching “Madison County TX,” covers more than a dozen county departments and services. It was built by OCV, LLC through its TheGovApp.com platform, which develops apps for government agencies and public safety organizations.

County Judge Clark Osborne said the project grew out of a simple problem.

“The number of calls that we take, either are we having county court next week, has jury duty been canceled, or are we under a burn ban,” Osborne said. “I mean, we answer dozens and dozens of those phone calls, and it was just easier to have an app.”

OCV typically builds apps for sheriff’s departments and emergency management offices. Madison County wanted more.

“We decided we’re going to do a whole lot more horizontal app than that,” Osborne said.

The home screen opens to icons for the Sheriff’s Office, Emergency Management, Courts, Clerks, Veterans Services, Commissioners Court, Police and Fire, Tax Assessor/Collector and more. Buttons for local lodging and local attractions sit above the department icons. A weather tab shows current, hourly and daily forecasts. An announcements tab at the bottom of the screen is where the county will post burn bans, jury duty cancellations and road closures as push notifications.

The Sheriff’s Office section alone includes an inmate search, commissary deposits, a most wanted list, a sex offender map with offender details, vacation watch requests, crash reports and a tip submission form. Residents can commend a deputy or report a road closure with their phone’s location and attach a photo.

The courts section breaks out the municipal court, justice of the peace, county court, 12th District Court and 278th District Court. Residents can pay tickets through links to existing court websites.

Under Commissioners Court, users can view the five members, check the meeting schedule, read agendas and minutes and pull up precinct maps. Each precinct’s dump station location, hours and rules are listed with maps.

The emergency management section includes creek and river gauge levels, power company outage maps for Entergy, Houston County Electric Co-op, Navasota Valley and Mid-South, a functional needs registry and a storm damage reporting form.

“If you go into that one and you have damage from a storm, you can report it directly there,” Emergency Management Coordinator Shelly Butts said. “You just fill out the form on your phone and it comes to us immediately.”

Butts said the app works alongside the county’s existing Genasys A!ERT notification system rather than replacing it.

“It’s meant to work with our emergency notification system that we currently have,” Butts said. “We want to keep both. It’s intending to be redundant.”

She said the key difference is scope. The Genasys system sends weather alerts based on a specific address. A tornado warning in Midway goes to residents who registered a Midway address but not to someone in North Zulch. The app sends push notifications to anyone in the county who has them enabled.

“You want to have both,” Butts said.

The county clerk section includes fee schedules, assumed names, marks and brands and records requests. The elections page will carry voting information during active election cycles, and officials are working on a feature that would let residents enter an address and find their voting precinct.

A financial transparency section links to budgets, treasurer’s reports and utility reports the county is required to publish.

The app also reaches beyond county government. It links to the ag extension office, chamber of commerce, Sunshine Center, Madison Resource Center, the groundwater conservation district, the appraisal district and the Madison County Historical Commission’s website, which Osborne called a deep resource for local attractions, eateries and historic markers.

The tourism sections were funded in part with hotel occupancy tax money. Local lodging pulls up a map of area hotels. Officials plan to add a community calendar with local events and a points of interest map.

“You can’t go anywhere to find out any floodplain information and find out whether there’s a burn ban and to find out where the jury duty’s in,” Osborne said. “There’s no one single place you can go to find any of that until now. So now there is.”

The project cost $14,000 for setup and the first year. Maintenance runs about $7,000 a year after that. Osborne and Butts completed training on the app’s control panel last week and have been making changes since. Some content updates can be made by county staff. Others require the vendor.

“It’s a very quick resource for the citizens to use and not have to call us,” Butts said. “They can literally just look at it.”

Officials said the app is still a work in progress. Planned additions include links to the school districts, the Madison County Fair Association and municipalities like Midway and Madisonville. A Crime Stoppers section beyond tip submission is in the works, and officials are developing a feature that would let residents look up their voting precinct by address.

The county plans to continue expanding the scope of the app as departments add content and residents provide feedback. Updates will roll out as they are completed.

“We’ll have some growing pains, but I think the growing pains will be worth it to where we get to,” Butts said.

Osborne said he plans to start directing residents to the app when they call with routine questions.

“Just go to the app,” Osborne said.

The app is free to download in the App Store and Google Play by searching “Madison County TX” or by visiting apps.myocv.com/share/ a154777864.