The White House Smart Cities program has issued a $75,000 grant to the city of Bellevue to design a way to monitor and study city vitals from one large platform, which would improve the way the city runs and interacts with its community members.
Bellevue has partnered with CH2M engineering and Kansas City, Missouri to innovate and come up with the blueprint that will allow the city to gather and manage this information from several departments within the city.
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Bellevue’s chief technology officer, Chelo Picardal, stated that the way cities operate could be significantly changed by what her staff and partnering agencies are doing.
“Smart Cities is driven by where cities are changing,” she said. “We are looking at how mature we are in terms of smartness in looking at this data.”
How Bellevue plans to answer the challenge
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) issued the “Global City Teams Challenge” during the White House Smart Cities Week. The challenge tasked some particular cities with forming “superclusters” with other cities and organizations in order to complete projects that would be too large for any one of them, individually.
Picardal explained that Bellevue wants to include advanced water metering technology in the Dashboard project. The metering technology has been on the utilities’ and city council agendas for a long time, and it will fit in with the project’s goal.
“If we are reacting to water leaks, for example, we might be able to see an uptick in water usage that isn’t normal and predict a pipe issue,” explained Picardal. “The advanced water meters are specific systems which could do this.”
With this project, the city of Bellevue should expect to see great improvements in many areas.
