Adopted in May and more recently released, as Chief Deputy Controller Rick Cole pointed out on LinkedIn, the city of Los Angeles’ FY 2023-24 budget reaches $13.2 billion and affirms the deep significance of IT, noting: “Emerging industries are largely technology driven, and include biomedical, digital information technology, environmental technology and aerospace.” The city’s capital and technology improvement policy pledges its responsibility for “the planning, development, acquisition, construction, and maintenance of critical capital and technology infrastructure” to ensure residents’ health, safety and well-being; indicates that the Office of the City Administrative Officer develops the Annual Capital and Technology Improvement Expenditure Program that is incorporated into budget development; and commits the city to quantifying and capturing, as much as possible, project costs over a five-year span and presenting them in a five-year Capital and Technology Improvement Plan, updated yearly. The technology portion of Los Angeles’ Capital and Technology Improvement Expenditure Program work tops $17.3 million in spend and includes:
- $3.8 million for a Voice Radio System Upgrade. The project, for the fire department, will derive its funding from the city General Fund.
- $3.6 million for Information Technology Agency (ITA) – Critical Public Safety Radio Infrastructure Repairs. This project, too, will be funded by the General Fund. (ITA’s adopted FY 2023-24 total budget is $111 million, encompassing expenditures and appropriations, which is about 11 percent larger than its FY 2022-23 adopted budget of $100.2 million.)
- $2 million to replatform the city’s MyLA311 system, which launched in 2013 and deployed an app more recently. Funding for this ITA project, in the works since at least 2022, will derive from Special Funds. ITA also indicates it will reappropriate up to $1 million in “unencumbered remaining balances in Information Technology Agency Fund 100/32, Contractual Services Account” to support the project.
- $2 million to replace obsolete network equipment, another ITA project. This initiative will be funded from the General Fund.
- $1.25 million for open data and digital services, listed in the budget area of General City Purposes.
- $17,000 for the Unified Homeless Response Center Data Project, also in General City Purposes. Per the budget, the money is for a new, unified platform to integrate data from multiple sources to report on data, including the availability of shelter beds and numbers of encampments.
