Bloomington Deputy City Manager Billy Tyus said the topic comes up in every conversation staff has.
Smart Cities technology, in its broadest sense, is intended to make city operations smoother for citizens and more efficient for city government.
“Everything from lighting – are there opportunities to implement smart technology? Are there ways to implement wireless technology? Are there ways to do other things as part of the planning process?” said Tyus in WGLT’s Sound Ideas.
Tyus said smart technology will be an important part of the downtown streetscape plan under development.
And it’s part of a new open-government platform approved for Bloomington’s community development department that will allow developers and property owners to complete permit applications and other city business online.
“If we find that traffic goes up when this system is designed to get people to do this work online, we can look at what we need to do to make the system more accessible. We may also need to do more marketing to make sure people know this system exists,” Tyus said.
The city will also be able to track the time it takes to process a permit, he said. And if that takes too long, it will look at what can be done differently to make things more efficient.
Smart Cities technology can be expensive, and many cities have to make special arrangements to implement and pay for it. Tyus said those only go so far. “In a lot of cases, this kind of work is also related to the opportunities that come along. Sometimes there are opportunities that we have to take advantage of that we didn’t necessarily plan for. It’s kind of a balancing act,” he said.
The city is upgrading its back-end data system and moving it to the cloud as well. Tyus said the new police technology, approved by the City Council this week, will save officers a lot of time. The City Council approved $2 million in purchases over a five-year period. The new technology will coordinate various devices to ensure video footage is recorded without a lot of action by officers.
“The new system we’re going to get automatically synchronizes the recording, the firearm and the tasers. There’s a trigger mechanism that allows all of that to work together,” Tyus said, adding that the body camera footage will automatically sync with the servers. Currently, officers have to manually upload the data.