LTC 087-2018 Miami Beach Selected as a bloomberg PhilanthropiesOFFICE OF THE CITY MANAGER
NO. LTC# 087-2018 LETTER TO COMMISSION
TO: Mayor Dan Gelber and Members ' f the City C mmission
FROM: Jimmy L. Morales, City Manage
DATE: February 21, 2018
SUBJECT: Miami Beach Selected As A Bloo berg Philanthropies Champion City
I am pleased to announce that Miami Beach has been recognized and selected by Bloomberg
Philanthropies as one of 35 Champion Cities in the 2018 Mayors Challenge!
Bloomberg Philanthropies knows that U.S. cities face challenges bigger than ever before.
"Innovation is no longer optional; it's necessary so cities can continue to deliver results
and improve life for residents." The 2018 Mayors Challenge was designed with this urgency
in mind. It is about thinking big and being bold and inventing replicable and scalable solutions to
today's toughest problems.
As part of the Champion City experience the City receives $100,000 and is assigned a coach
to support testing and refining our big idea. Our big idea is to create new and integrated
tools to reduce uncertainty and damage from weather and climate. Our concept is to create
and use an integrated centralized data operations system encompassing data science and
analytics on hydrological and meteorological datasets. Correlations would then be run and
predictive tools would be developed to exponentially improve our capacity for making better
decisions — from simple personal and daily decisions about how to deal with a weather event, or
more complex and expensive decisions on how to reduce risk citywide. Simply stated, we need
integrated meteorological and tidal predictions to protect people and property.
Our coach will prepare the project team to test our idea. Our 100 RC partners across the bay,
the City of Miami, has also been identified as a Champion City. As such, they too will receive a
grant award and we will share the services of the coach to strengthen our concept and broaden
the benefit to the Greater Miami area.
Please join me in congratulating Susanne Torriente, Chief Resilience Officer / Assistance City
Manager, Amy Knowles, Deputy Resilience Officer; Judy Hoanshelt, Grants Manager; and our
technical geniuses, Carlos Tamayo and Elias Galvan de Lima, Engineers from Public Works.
This is the team that wrote the grant application and will be leading idea development over the
next six months. For more details about the Challenge and the other cities please see the
attached press release or visit httr):Hmavorschallenae.bloom bera.ora/
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Cha pion Ci*ti*es
—or "Champion Cities"—in the 2018 Mayors Challenge will spend
the next six months testing and refining their big ideas for tackling
everything from opioid addiction to climate change. And while only
five cities will win prizes later this year—including one $5 million
prize and four $1 million prizes—all will walk away winners, and that
much closer to solving some of our cities' toughest concerns. (See the
full list of 35 cities here.)
Here are just five of the ways these 35 Champion Cities are taking
charge:
Empowering citizens to tackle climate change
Among the 35 Champion Cities, no single problem comes up more
than climate change. And mayors are tackling it from a number of
angles. Several seek to address the impacts of severe storms, extreme
heat and rising seas. Three cities that have no choice but to look for
new ways to co -exist with water—Charleston, S.C., Miami, and
Miami Beach—want to create alert systems that will help inform
residents' long-term decisions, like property investment, and short-
term decisions, like how to change your commute to work during a
flood.
Fighting opioid addiction from new fronts
The second most prominent issue among the 35 cities is public health.
Responding to drug abuse, and the opioid crisis in particular, is a
major theme. Cary, N.C. hopes to get real-time data on which
neighborhoods are most impacted by opioids by analyzing traces of the
drugs in the city's sewers. Ithaca, meanwhile, wants to create a one-
stop support hub for drug treatment, including an on-site
"consumption space" where addicts can use drugs under supervision.
And Huntington, W.Va., is addressing "compassion fatigue" among
first responders who have become flooded with calls related to heroin
overdosing. The city wants to embed mental health professionals with
EMTs, both to help prevent burnout and also to help connect the drug
abuser to long-term treatment services.
[Get the latest news on urban innovation! Subscribe to SPARK.]
Ending and preventing homelessness
At a time when homelessness in the U.S. is rising for the first time
since 2010, two cities are proposing innovative ways of addressing the
problem. Austin, Texas, thinks Blockchain—the technology behind
cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin—can streamline the paperwork
behind homeless services, particularly when it comes to verifying
persons who may not have identification. Los Angeles wants to
encourage homeowners to build backyard housing units; in exchange
for financial incentives, they would commit to housing a homeless
resident for three years. Elk Grove, Calif., meanwhile, has an idea that
may prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place: Work
with landlords to create a common rental housing application. For
renters, it could save hundreds of dollars on application fees. For
landlords, it could reduce time running credit checks and verifying
references.
Experimenting with transportation
The ridesharing revolution has some mayors thinking about how to
leverage the model to benefit low-income residents better. For
example, South Bend, Ind., wants to collaborate with rideshare
services and employers to help people without cars get to work. It's
expected to particularly benefit part-time and shift workers who have
difficulty reaching factories and offices via transit at off-peak hours. In
Boulder, Colo., the city plans to run three experiments aimed at
boosting access to shared electric vehicles. Durham, N.C., is also
planning a series of experiments—in their case, to test four low-cost
methods that apply behavioral insights to nudge people away from
single -occupancy commutes.
[Read: The Mayors Challenge: Unleashing the power of public
prototyping]
Building more equitable cities
The need to address inequity is a powerful thread running through
many plans of the 35 Champion Cities. In two cases, cities are
acknowledging that the problem is structural—and requires new
structures to fix it. In Grand Rapids, Mich., where city leaders fear
many of their African-American and Hispanic residents aren't
benefiting from the city's recent economic success, they are looking to
create a grassroots -led community census in order to gather data that
will be used to more equitably align city budgets and services. And in
Boston, where people in wealthier communities use 311 twice as often
as others, city leaders hope to infuse equity into their approach to
allocate resources for sidewalk repair and street maintenance by
augmenting 311 dispatch requests with data on community need,
pavement condition, and usage.
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