HARRISVILLE — The borough will soon have its own website, council announced at its Monday, April 14, meeting.

This will be a first for Harrisville’s leaders, who currently use Facebook for disseminating information and communicating with borough residents.

According to council member Carolyn Steglich, residents can expect to be able to access past meeting agendas, meeting minutes and information on community events via the website. Steglich will work with borough clerk Doug Cook to create downloadable PDFs.

“The site isn’t quite done, they’ve got the shell built with various pages, but there isn’t a lot of content on there at this time,” Steglich said.

For Harrisville Mayor Dan Anschutz, the website has been a longtime coming.

“When I was appointed as mayor, one of the first things I started to work on was to obtain a ‘.gov’ domain for the borough,” he said. “I learned quickly from our police department that they were having issues obtaining information from out of state organizations/departments for their investigations due to not having an official .gov email account,” Anschutz said.

Anschutz, who was appointed mayor in July 2024, says the borough is excited to bring a more modern user-friendly experience to its residents.

According to Anschutz, residents have been asking for digital access to borough meeting agendas, minutes, community events and local updates.

“This new site is a direct response to that feedback,” Anschutz said.

The community will benefit from the new site in many ways, most importantly, in areas of communication and transparency. The site is being designed to provide easier access to public notices, borough news and contact information for officials.

“The current council has been working hard to get the borough back on track and we are really excited to let everyone see the work we have been doing,” Anschutz said.

Borough offices are only open two days a week, one of the goals with the new site would be to provide support and answers to residents without having to wait for someone to return their call.

According to Anschutz, the borough does not have an official date for the website to go live. At Monday’s meeting, Steglich said it could be a few weeks.

Steglich also invited members of council to submit photos, if they have any, from community events, so they can be used on the website.

At the March 10 meeting, Council voted to hire Course Vector, a Cumberland County webpage design company to create and develop a website at the cost of $2,011 for the first year of service.

Additionally, the borough will be provided two “.gov” email addresses, one for the borough building and the other for the Harrisville Police Department.