City of Tarpon Springs, FL Overhauls City Services with One Connected Civic Impact Platform, Reaching 456,000 Page Views

Modernizing City Hall for a Community of 26,000

Tarpon Springs, Florida, is a working waterfront city of about 26,000 residents, known for its Greek heritage, sponge docks, and shrimp boats that still head out each morning. “We have a very strong sense of identity and culture,” said Suzanne Linton, IT Director and Chief Information Security Officer for the City of Tarpon Springs. “It’s a wonderful place to raise a family. It’s a great place to work. And it’s just a really great little community.”

That strong sense of hometown connection did not always carry through to the City’s online experience. Information such as agendas, service links, and department resources often lived in separate places, making it harder for residents to quickly find what they needed. “Our information was spread across different systems,” Linton said. “Residents did not always know where to go or how to find what they were looking for.” Tarpon Springs saw an opportunity to create a more connected experience by bringing its website, agenda management, and public-facing communication together under one provider.

Bringing Scattered Systems Under One Umbrella

The City’s previous website had served the community for many years and expanded over time as services, programs, and online information continued to grow. As the City’s digital presence evolved, it became clear there was an opportunity to make information easier to navigate and create a more consistent experience for residents. “The homepage had grown so much that residents could easily get lost in the amount of information,” Linton said.

Even simple tasks, such as locating a department phone number or finding a link, could take more effort than they should. In some cases, residents became frustrated and chose to visit City Hall in person instead. “We wanted residents to be able to find what they needed without having to search through page after page,” Linton said.

The same challenges affected public meetings. Agenda materials were collected from departments and assembled manually before meetings, while City staff also coordinated broadcasts across Facebook, YouTube, and local television networks. Last-minute changes, missing presentation materials, or meeting cancellations were not always communicated through one central system.

“There were times when someone would arrive for a meeting with a PowerPoint that staff had never received, or our production team would prepare for a meeting that had already been canceled,” Linton said. “We needed a more coordinated way to manage the entire process.” Linton saw an opportunity to create a more connected digital experience by bringing the City’s website, agenda management, and resident communication tools together within one coordinated platform. The goal was simple: make information easier to find, reduce unnecessary steps, and give residents a more consistent experience when interacting with the City online.

One Platform for Agendas, the Website, and Resident Questions

Tarpon Springs decided to consolidate rather than shop for separate solutions for their website, agenda management, and chatbot. Linton called sister cities already using CivicPlus and asked how it was going. “They all said it was fantastic,” she said. The City brought on CivicPlus Agenda and Meeting Management first, then added a Municipal Website, Chatbot, and mobile app as one package.

Agenda and Meeting Management

Every department now builds and submits its own agenda items, which route through an approval workflow to the city manager’s office before publishing. Once an item is approved, a single administrative assistant in the city manager’s office publishes the agenda, handles any later changes, and republishes again, so there is never more than one live version. Board members traded thick printed binders for iPads and laptops that pull the current version automatically. “Now it’s just instantaneous,” Linton said. “They click on it. They can see the backup right there. If it was changed, it changes automatically.”

Livestreaming that once ran across three broadcast networks plus Facebook and YouTube now flows through a single platform. Every department completed hands-on training before the system went live. When they have questions, staff now turn to the CivicPlus Support Portal to file their own tickets instead of calling IT directly. “We trained them all how to use the support portal,” Linton said, “so they’re not having to reach out to IT every time.” Residents can also pull up the agenda, past meeting recordings, and minutes directly in the lobby, thanks to the touchscreen kiosks Tarpon Springs installed as an additional access point.

Municipal Websites

Instead of guessing at content priorities, the City asked each department for its top five most-asked questions from phone calls and emails. Combined with recurring chatbot queries, that list shaped what landed on the new homepage, from paying a utility bill to garbage pickup schedules. Pages of historical text about department founding dates gave way to the information residents actually wanted. Content management became a shared responsibility across departments, allowing subject matter experts throughout the City to keep information current while working within a consistent Citywide design and structure.

Additionally, residents can now sign up directly through the site for text and email alerts.
Building a page means using a simple drag-and-drop editor to place and resize widgets of content anywhere on the page, not writing code. “You took all the coding out of it, making it much easier,” Linton said. Staff training covered accessibility basics, like writing alt text so a screen reader can describe a photo to a resident who has a visual impairment, and the platform’s staff directory now gives every department a page with contact information and a short bio for each employee.

The homepage’s photography comes from a resident photo contest the City ran years earlier, where residents submitted their best shots of Tarpon Springs and the City picked its favorites as winners. Those same images now anchor the new site, and residents notice. “When the citizens see them, they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, that was my picture,’” Linton said.

Chatbot

To learn what was driving people to the site, the City built a custom chatbot named “Spongy,” a nod to its sponge-diving heritage. Linton’s IT team designed the character in-house, giving him a wave and a blink to keep the experience approachable. Spongy can also crawl a curated list of approved outside sites, so questions about local museums or historical landmarks return real answers instead of dead ends, and Linton gets a daily email showing every question Spongy was asked and whether he answered it successfully. When someone asks where to eat, though, Spongy doesn’t pick favorites among local restaurants; it points to the Chamber of Commerce’s full listing instead. “It turned out to be very powerful because we could give them the information that they needed without being biased,” Linton said.

A Platform Residents and Staff Actually Wanted to Use

Before launch, Linton tested the redesigned website with employees representing a range of roles and levels of comfort with technology. The goal was simple: make sure information could be found quickly and intuitively by anyone using the site.

She asked them to locate a specific board meeting and its supporting documents using only the new homepage. “They only made a few clicks and they were there,” she said. A search bar and Spongy gave residents two other paths to the same information if they didn’t want to click through the menu.

Staff quickly discovered that updating their own pages was much simpler than they expected. The drag-and-drop tools and standardized templates helped departments become comfortable managing their content and created strong Citywide adoption. “The anxiety left because they were all scared that this was going to be a big deal,” Linton said. “So that buy-in alone created immense time savings for us. Now every department is doing their own updates.” Agenda management training reached full participation across every department head and administrative assistant, including staff who described themselves as the least comfortable with technology in the building.

Reaching Residents Far Beyond City Limits

Tarpon Springs had never measured its digital reach before switching platforms. Between May 2025 and May 2026, the City’s website logged 124,000 active users and 456,000 page views, a striking reach for a city of 26,000 residents.

Residents Notice the Difference

Residents noticed the shift immediately, both in person at city board meetings and in writing.

Every question Spongy fields also points the team toward a gap in the site itself, and Linton treats each one as a signal rather than a one-off. “If one person’s going to your website asking that question, you have 20 more who have the same question,” she said. “So if you can fix that for that one, you’ve just fixed it for 20.”

Advice for Other Local Governments

Linton is already looking at what else the City can do, including moving the City’s newsletter off a separate email tool so it lives on the same system as everything else. She sees CivicPlus’ visibility across its network of cities as one of the biggest ongoing advantages of staying with one vendor.

That same logic drives the advice Linton gives other local governments weighing a similar overhaul: Don’t shop separately for every piece.

For a small IT team without the bandwidth to build everything from scratch, that guidance has made a real difference. “It takes a lot of the pressure off of building things in-house,” she said. Staff have settled into the partnership the same way they settled into the platform itself, knowing what to expect instead of bracing for it.

A Change Felt on Both Sides of the Counter

Looking back at how much the City has modernized, from public meetings and agenda management to the website and resident communication, Linton sees one consistent theme: creating a simpler and more connected experience for both employees and residents.