FROM MAIN STREET PAGE 1 City awarded for being innovative
By ALICE OLLSTEIN Special to the Daily Press
DOWNTOWN The Public Technology Institute presented City Hall with a Technology Solutions Award for the new SantaMoniCard, a debit card that can be loaded with money and swiped at any city parking meter.
PTI further awarded City Hall with three honorable mentions — two in the sustain-ability category and one for telecommunications and information technology.
The parking meter debit card program won a sustainability award, because, as Chief Information Officer Jory Wolf commented, “Instead of disposing of the card, you can renew the value.”
The program has been running for a little over a year and a half, and Wolf believes that there’s “a large number of people using it, and it has been widely accepted.”
Future plans include expanding the availability of locations to renew the card, as there are currently just two. Others ideas include the use of either the SantaMoniCard or a regular credit card in parking structures in order to alleviate the problem of downtown shoppers being caught cashless as they try to exit.
“People don’t carry around cash as much as they used to,” Wolf said. “The city has to adjust.”
PTI also gave an honorable mention to Santa Monica’s Advanced Traffic Management System, which uses a city-wide network to address the serious problem of congested streets. While City Hall has only set up 11 signals on Fourth Street, they plan to reach a total of 178 within the next few years and have cameras monitoring traffic on the major arteries.
“With this software, if there’s an accident, construction or just bad weather, we can adjust the signals to help traffic,” Wolf said. “It’s very flexible.”
Further honorable mentions were given to the Mobile Work Management System, which allows Water Resource Division work crews to enter data from laptops in the field, and CityNet, a city project to distribute unused fiber optic bandwidth to local business in need of intensive communication services.
“We are generating additional revenue by renting out a significant amount of unused dark fiber throughout the city,” Wolf explained. “We’re helping local business get affordable broadband services, especially high tech, entertainment and new media companies. Through this, we’re improving their ability to communicate large amounts of data throughout the region and the world. They’ve been using CityNet to transmit large amounts of video from Santa Monica to their offices in London, Paris, New York and Melbourne.”
The program, Wolf noted, is part of City Hall’s larger effort to attract and maintain environmentally friendly businesses.
“We like to nurture the green businesses in Santa Monica while making good use of a city resource,” he said.“These companies are about not polluting the environment. They’re green because they use broadband to transport goods and information instead of vehicles.”
These honors, given to local governments across the country for technological innovation, are specifically for city projects that improve communication, lower costs and generate revenue. Santa Monica has won 11 PTI awards and 6 honorable mentions over the past seven years, earning a record four awards and three honorable mentions last year.
“We seem to continue to win quite a bit,” Wolf said. “The city is a leader in implementing technology to best serve the community.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 31, 2008. Read the original PDF.