1st South Bend, Ind.
Taking the lead in the 75,000 – 124,999 population category is South Bend, Ind. Most notably, this city was recognized for its IT investments and innovative practices in artificial intelligence (AI) governance and cybersecurity.
South Bend is investing in IT to modernize services for constituents. An increased budget for 2024 enabled teambuilding, more cybersecurity spending and support for the city’s new Digital Services team, among other things. The team was created in January 2024 to improve the user experience and take the lead on website governance, design and accessibility standards, and data collection practices. The team also provides training for public information professionals, city planners, project members and other city staff that may work with resident-facing digital tools.
In the AI space, the city has taken several noteworthy actions to better leverage this technology. For one, city officials are involved in AI-related work with the GovAI Coalition, the MetroLab Network and the National League of Cities AI Advisory Committee. Beyond that, the city has developed generative AI policies for staff use and customized training for staff on how to use generative AI in alignment with the city’s policies. Notably, the city has made these resources public for the benefit of information-sharing with other localities.
Finally, the city has made strides in cybersecurity awareness and education. The city started conducting phishing drills on city staff in 2021 and found a fail rate of more than 50 percent. Through training and education, the city has provided baseline cybersecurity risk awareness to staff at every level, reducing the most recent phishing drill fail rate to 4.5 percent. The city’s Cybersecurity Leadership Taskforce, established in 2023, supports cybersecurity policy compliance and the adoption of new tools.
2nd Carlsbad, Calif.
Also notable is the development of a new internal application for managing travel reimbursement applications, the code for which was 60 percent written by AI and 40 percent written by staff. The project digitized a paper process, saving some $90,000 per year while improving record keeping and transparency and successfully handling more than 1,400 reimbursement applications.
3rd Avondale, Ariz.
Ingenuity in times of budget challenges places Avondale, Ariz., in the third spot for this population category. While the city faces an estimated loss of $230 million of tax revenue in 2025 due to a state law change, it’s focused on expanding economic development opportunities for constituents while engaging high schoolers and college students in civic processes.
One forward-thinking pilot hosted by the city is a new engagement platform in the metaverse. The city partnered with Phoenix smart region The Connective to create a way for residents to engage with City Council members in a virtual and interactive environment. Another pilot that has come from the partnership with The Connective collects sentiment analysis. The technology will be used for special events to gauge satisfaction as customers leave the venue.
To educate the city’s 800 employees about cybersecurity, the IT department went outside the box, partnering with marketing and public relations to create an awareness program centered on the TV series “Inside Man” to encourage viewership. They then hosted a movie day with a series of short films and quizzes about cybersecurity to encourage employees to think about how their daily actions can impact the workforce.
To bridge the digital divide, Avondale formed Fiber Force, a task force of city staff across different departments to research and develop strategies for partnering on broadband deployment throughout the city. The task force consults with telecommunications companies and other cities to study license agreements, best practices for fiber systems, and more.
4th Allen, Tex.
Allen, Texas, has locked down technology for a stronger cybersecurity stance and implemented a single platform to manage city hardware. Future proofing is one reason the city of about 115,000 is recognized as a digital city – it has been proactive in disaster recovery planning, containing rising technology costs and implementing a remote work policy in 2022.
More than a year after a mass shooting, city leaders list constituent safety and well-being as their top priority. The city uses its website, social media, YouTube and additional channels to convey pertinent news, information and relevant video series.
Safety and security translate in the IT shop in ways such as embedding IT into emergency management and disaster recovery and creating more internal opportunities to evangelize computer hygiene and cybersecurity. Part of the work has been made possible through state-provided training and federal State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program funds. A combination of tools for cybersecurity ensures fleet laptops are secure, endpoints are monitored 24/7/365 and security breaches are caught in minutes instead of hours or days. Equipment and data stewardship along with cost containment help save taxpayer dollars.
As city IT continues to look toward the future, it has implemented an AI policy but is moving cautiously. Allen has been testing AI for use in IT help desk functions and is planning on more small-batch AI testing such as with Microsoft Copilot and GIS applications.
5th Lynchburg, Va.
Lynchburg ranked fifth in its population category this year, thanks to new measures designed to improve resident engagement and services, such as a March Madness-inspired tool the city’s IT department created to increase citizen involvement in the annual budget planning process. Dubbed the Budget Bracket Challenge, the tool randomly pairs city services for citizens to vote on, allowing them to gauge how others voted as winning services climb the ranks. City leaders, in turn, use this data to make more informed decisions about the financial support each service receives.
The IT department also helped modernize Lynchburg’s online presence this year, assisting in the launch of a new website and YouTube channel. Unique website visitors have since increased by 25 percent, and there’s been a 15 percent rise in viewership for the city’s streamed meetings and events.
Technology has also played a key role in improving the city’s police force. Lynchburg officers have been able to practice critical skills, such as de-escalation and decision-making in high-stress situations, using the Axon VR police training program, which was implemented this summer.
Lynchburg has made moves to strengthen online safety as well, expanding its IT security team from one to three staff members. In another workforce initiative, IT leaders increased the salary for entry-level service desk employees by more than 10 percent this year. The pay bump has allowed the department to recruit and maintain staff in what had been a high-turnover, hard-to-fill position.
5th Roanoke, Va.
Roanoke is once again in the top 10 for its population category, due in large part to work around engaging its community. Roanoke’s Office of Community Engagement manages the city’s website, social media, project engagement pages and digital newsletters. It also provides support to the social media and web staff across other departments, too, so that Roanoke has a coherent and unified digital presence. That’s not all though. Recently, the city has also started using the Zencity platform to aggregate all of the community feedback it gets from digital sources. This allows Roanoke to efficiently analyze and respond to its community members. The platform enables timely updates for residents about things like a recent bridge construction project.
Another ongoing project for Roanoke is the construction of a real-time crime center for the police department, which officials expect will enable better use of technologies that support public safety, including mobile security cameras, license plate readers, police drones, body cameras and more. The city is also joining a new pilot program funded by the Virginia Attorney General. Along with six other jurisdictions, Roanoke will send electronic public safety data to a centralized platform, which will streamline it in user-friendly ways to read, facilitating cross-jurisdictional investigations.
Finally, the city made strides in cybersecurity this year, building a new cyber platform through a vendor partnership with Assura, which recommended new cyber policies. Subsequently, Roanoke has created 18 new security policies, and it is currently working to implement them.
6th North Port, Fla.
North Port, Fla., has adopted cutting-edge strategies to enhance resident safety during crises, such as Hurricane Ian, by utilizing the FlowMSP platform. Previously, staff had to manually search through over 900 pre-plan PDFs to locate critical information for first responders.
With the new system, essential emergency response information is consolidated, and CAD data is automatically received, allowing responders immediate access to accurate pre-plans and detailed information. This implementation significantly improves situational awareness during crises, leading to quicker and more effective responses.
Over the past year, the city has enhanced transparency by sharing key performance indicators (KPIs) and using Google Analytics to monitor citizen engagement. It collects feedback through surveys, including a customer service survey and a vote for the North Port Greenest Citizen, strengthening connections with residents.
Performance dashboards are organized separately by department, featuring KPIs, goals and detailed narratives, making the information easy to navigate. In addition, North Port is introducing a Citizen Problem Reporter, enabling residents to report issues that need prompt attention from city departments.
North Port launched the redesigned NorthPortFL.gov in September 2023 which features key services prominently on the home page. The site has been streamlined from over 1,200 pages to about 300 for better navigation and meets accessibility standards including a translation button for Spanish, Ukrainian, Russian and Haitian Creole.
7th Pueblo, Colo.
Driven by an impressive grant-applying effort — 100 applications in 2023 — the city of Pueblo has been quite busy with IT projects. This has included improved resiliency at its disaster recovery site, new citizen service options for public records requests, licenses, permits and recreational activities and a new AI chatbot deployment.
But there are two areas where Pueblo’s IT efforts have shined: public safety and accessibility.
For the police department, IT is implementing a new CAD/RMS system and helping set up a new real-time crime center that will ingest many sources of intelligence — including a segmented Internet of Things network to take in surveillance footage from cameras owned by both the city and external partners. The city has also upgraded its in-car camera systems in patrol vehicles, which means every car now has its own router and the ability to livestream video. In the future, body-worn cameras might tie into these systems to allow for different cameras to “hand off” video from one device to another, with one composite video produced between them.
In the accessibility realm, the city has achieved greater than 90 percent compliance with selected web accessibility standards and is working to improve even further. This work has involved a relaunch of the city website, updating 4,600 pages in a six-month period and deploying a tool that allows users to customize their accessibility settings. Other tools continuously monitor for accessibility compliance and provide a tracking report of these metrics, and the city has created compliance checklists for both vendors and internal content creators.
Forthcoming efforts include an app to share patient information in emergency situations, a test of AI-controlled traffic signals and an initiative to go passwordless across the city enterprise.
8th Schaumburg, Ill.
The village of Schaumburg earned its place in this year’s survey through a focus on preparation, analysis and accountability. The Chicago suburb of more than 76,000 residents has a well-staffed IT department that includes two software developers, a technical solutions manager, an innovation strategist and a certified business process analyst.
Officials connect to constituents via key performance indicators across multiple platforms that measure responsiveness and response times, then make results publicly available in a dashboard. They use quarterly and annual surveys to get public feedback on initiatives and operations. Leaders have also put in place better standards and role-based access control at their data warehouse, ensuring information security and privacy.
The village’s website was upgraded to be more user-friendly and responsive; it now uses analytics, metrics and engagement data to spot user trends and needs. An AI policy is under development, to guide its ethical, effective use and ensure projects adhere to Schaumburg’s values and objectives. The village is also using Microsoft’s Copilot to drive productivity by automating routine tasks and cutting manual workloads.
During this fiscal year, leaders stood up a new cybersecurity solution to enable continuous, proactive threat monitoring and immediate response. They also implemented Microsoft Azure, leveraging its cloud environment for flexibility and scalability; and deployed a revised backup strategy. The village has deployed OpenGov to let residents submit and track applications online, bringing faster processing times.
9th Westminster, Colo.
Doing more with less was an imperative last year for the city of Westminster, Colo., which devoted attention to contingencies and future-proofing in the face of staffing shortages. Given the expanding budget and purview of the IT department, the city in 2024 reorganized it into three divisions: administration, information systems and software engineering. This allows IT to organize expenditures related to those functions into their own budget categories. The IT director also took over the enterprise applications team and had them focus on solving technology needs of specific departments as soon as possible. This helped the IT director to be a more effective communicator between executive leadership and IT staff.
To address resiliency, the city set up a data warehouse with Microsoft Azure data analytics to store a handful of data pipelines, with more planned. At the same time, IT started requiring more stringent vendor access controls and implemented a software tool, BeyondTrust, to manage vendor access. The city has been regularly tapping the Homeland Security Grant Program to deal with rising cybersecurity costs. One example of this is paying for a professional cybersecurity assessment that led the city to require credit card security training for staff. IT further upgraded the city’s password change self-service for city employees; did an assessment of its disaster recovery plan; and updated it regarding where the city would recover its data, what applications it would restore first and how long it would take.
In public-facing projects, Westminster continued upgrading core broadband infrastructure, expanding two 1-gigabyte Internet lines to five 2-gigabyte lines and adding over 40 wireless access points across the city. The city is also working on an intergovernmental agreement with a local school district to share fiber. For transparency, the city started using OpenGov’s cloud software to make budgeting more transparent for the public and launched a new agenda management tool for City Council documents.
10th Independence, Mo.
A city-owned power company distinguishes the city of Independence, Mo., where technology plays a key role in increasing the efficiency of city services.
The city’s power company, Independence Power and Light, has supported the development of a fiber backbone to numerous city buildings, including the new City Hall and two fire stations. Providing a new method of reliable connectivity to the fire stations by putting them on the city’s Wi-Fi network has saved the city money, improved network speed and enabled more centralized network management.
Another way the city is improving the efficiency of city services is through the recent implementation of Five9 software for customer service agents. The software solution leverages interactive voice response to provide information to callers, and skills-based routing to connect callers to customer service agents. This software has resulted in a 40 percent reduction in call queue times.
These developments, paired with the city’s consolidation of IT staff under a single department in recent years, support more efficient and cost-effective service delivery.
