The $1 trillion infrastructure bill President Biden signed last year includes a $500 million grant program over five years for smart city projects incorporating technology like, autonomous transportation, and “smart” traffic sensors. It also allocates $65 billion in new broadband connectivity spending. While it’s exciting to envision how these technologies will transform virtually all aspects of living and working in cities, city and regional leaders throughout Florida say ensuring those benefits extend to all residents and businesses is their top priority.
“The pandemic brought into sharp relief the disparity in our communities between those residents who can afford the latest and greatest technologies and those who can’t,” said Dr. Wazir Ishmael, City Manager, City of Hollywood. “Residents in the wealthier areas of our city were rapid adopters of our virtual meeting solutions that require high-speed broadband internet connections and webcams to log onto online platforms like Zoom or WebEx. But others in low and moderate-income communities didn’t have access to those technologies or had trouble using them.
“We’re a connected community, but not everyone’s partaking. We need to fix that.”
Dr. Ishmael was a panelist on a recent virtual roundtable discussion sponsored by Comcast Business and the South Florida Business Journal that examined the opportunities and challenges before Florida’s city and municipality leaders as they pursue their smart city initiatives.
Wayne Messam, Mayor for the City of Miramar; Raimundo Rodulfo, Director of IT/Chief Innovation Officer for the City of Coral Gables; and Jeff Sheffield, Executive Director, North Florida Transportation Planning Organization, also participated. Sarah Hand, CEO of Spark Growth, a consulting and management services company headquartered in Bradenton, moderated the discussion.
According to Mayor Messam, the goal of achieving equity should extend to a city’s business development efforts. While providing companies with access to a high-tech infrastructure is essential, so is providing the residents who will comprise their workforces with opportunities to receive training on the requisite technical skill sets.
The panelists’ concerns reflect the priorities among mayors nationwide, according to the National League of Cities’ 2022 State of the Cities report published last month.
“Recognizing a dire need to fix our roads and bridges, repair our water systems and close the digital divide, this year, mayors highlighted funding infrastructure demands as their number one priority,” Clarence E. Anthony, CEO and Executive Director of the National League of Cities, wrote in the forward of the NLC report. “These priorities are just a small sample of cities’ efforts from the past year to drive forward an equitable recovery from the pandemic. And ensuring that recovery is equitable for everyone is critical.”
Reflecting on the pandemic’s impact, the panelists described how their use of technology to keep their governments running during months of lockdown provided roadmaps for making operations more efficient and improving service delivery to all residents.
“The pandemic actually made us even more agile and able to get more things done quicker,” said Dr. Ishmael. “We adopted an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to ease our transition to working remotely full time while maintaining critical services like conducting inspections, processing payments, and issuing permits. All government functions continued without delay while the city was physically closed.”
The City of Miramar collects a significant portion of its general fund through the fees it charges for various services. The pandemic-imposed lockdown threatened to eliminate the critical revenue stream.
“Our estate residents couldn’t visit our various agencies in person, which meant we couldn’t charge fees for several services like issuing permits,” said Mayor Messam. “We had to help our people make the transition to working remotely. While we already had the necessary IT infrastructure, the challenge was scaling it to support all city employees.”
In addition to keeping the government running, the city explored the role technology could play in helping businesses like restaurants and small retailers that were hit hardest by the pandemic.
“Our Office of Economic and Business Development went to work to partner with our business community, specifically our small business community, that rely heavily on in-person foot traffic,” said Messam. “We provided them resources to help them digitize their business, such as implementing an eCommerce platform and connecting with third party food and product delivery services like Uber Eats and DoorDash.”
“Particularly during the early days of the pandemic and when infection rates surged, we had enormous volumes of data coming from multiple places, including hospitals and various local and federal government agencies,” said Rodulfo. “Having the ability to aggregate all that data and analyze it helped us coordinate our efforts to help residents suffering Covid-19 infections with emergency response teams and healthcare officials.”
“A piece of technology is only useful if the data it provides helps guide our decision-making on measures we take to improve operational efficiency and provide better and more convenient services and programs to all of our residents,” added Dr. Ishmail.
Rodulfo has been working on “constructing” smart cities for decades, working as an engineer in the telecommunications and electronics industries before joining the City of Coral Cables almost 20 years ago. He has garnered numerous Smart Cities and innovation awards for the city by leveraging technology innovations to improve the quality and delivery of all municipal services.
“My private sector experience has helped inform our approach to building the infrastructure foundation for all of the services we deliver today,” he said. “For example, we deployed smart sensors throughout the city and analyze the continuous streams of real-time data they provide to improve traffic flow and make our streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians.”
The panelists all agreed that they don’t work in a vacuum. They all collaborate with colleagues in public and private sectors throughout the state to help one another implement new technology, expand access to underserved communities, and attract technology companies to their regions.
For example, Mayor Messam held up the public-private partnership between Broward County and Nova Southeastern University to build the Alan B. Levan | NSU Broward Center of Innovation. The facility provides incubator and accelerator programs to help local technology startup companies bring their innovative ideas to market and connect them with venture capitalists and potential public and private sector customers.
Jeff Sheffield with the North Florida Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) said supporting technology startups and early growth stage companies is critical to expanding the technology industry’s Florida footprint. That’s one reason the TPO launched its Smart North Florida initiative to harness the power of regional collaboration, coordinated data, and smart technologies to improve North Florida’s economic competitiveness.
“We’re creating the opportunity for startups and other companies to ‘sandbox’ and then deploy their solutions in our communities at no or even low cost to them,” said Sheffield. “Our region’s chambers of commerce and economic development commissions would love to find big technology companies that want to relocate to Florida, but that isn’t the only way to build Florida’s tech sector. We want to grow from within by helping local startups and convincing founders and innovative thinkers that we have created the environment they need to succeed.”
But creating that welcoming environment doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any vetting process to evaluate the value a technology company may bring to Florida’s residents and business communities. “We have identified specific issues and use cases for how technology can benefit communities across our region,” added Sheffield. “We focus our resource investment on regional collaboration, data coordination, and smart technology to improve public service delivery.”
Delivering results
The panelists agreed that improving public service delivery is the metric that informs all of their technology decisions.
“That means improving the resiliency of services, sustainability, operational efficiencies, and quality of life in areas important for our residents and visitors,” said Rodulfo. “That extends to many areas including public safety, mass transit and mobility, job creation, education, healthcare, and providing rapid response to hurricanes or other emergencies are at the core of our mission.”
It’s a mission that cities around the world share. Mayor Messam studies how his peers are applying technology to advance their smart city projects and achieve measurable results in areas like reducing traffic congestion and pollution. The federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act earmarks a significant amount of dollars for the expansion of EV charging station infrastructure through the Department of Transportation. So, in addition to improving mass transit options, the city is exploring how to reduce “charge anxiety” and encourage individuals and businesses to embrace electric vehicles (EVs).
“We need to make it easy and convenient for people to charge their electric cars so we’re creating a master plan for establishing networks of electric vehicle charging stations throughout the city on both private and city-owned property,” he said. “We have already embarked on the process of identifying sites throughout the city, as well as exploring converting our city’s vehicle fleets to EVs.”
Dr. Ishmail added that he’s been impressed with how cities throughout Broward County and Florida are working together despite the fact they each have their own plans, budgets, and goals.
“There are more than 30 municipalities in Broward County and I think one objective we share is implementing so-called smart codes,” he said. “Most land use and zoning codes have their roots in a previous century and are a bad fit for today’s digital age.”
Rodulfo ran down a list of U.S. cities that Coral Gables officials are collaborating with as they continue working to build out and modernize the city’s IT and communications infrastructures.
“Las Vegas is deploying small sensors and communication networks in very efficient ways and New York City is launching a number of new digital platforms and applications to foster direct engagement with residents and businesses,” he said. “We’re also looking at how San Jose has taken steps to help its small business community thrive in the digital economy by leveraging technology to facilitate eCommerce and bolster cybersecurity.”
---
Quelle/Source: South Florida Business Journal, 15.07.2022
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
