A Look Back: Cities Continue to Plan for the Future

This year, Industry Insider — Texas has heard firsthand how local leadership shapes a city’s future and citizen experience while influencing other large municipalities.

Here are a few of those stories from 2023, ordered by the city’s population rank:

The Houston Mayor’s Office of Human Trafficking and Domestic Violence partnered with Thomson Reuters to take stewardship of and distribute the city’s digital anti-trafficking toolkits, with an eye to disrupt and end human trafficking. This move was in part inspired by the coming retirement of Mayor Sylvester Turner and a need to solidify the office’s long-term work and influence in this area.

San Antonio CIO Craig Hopkins shared with Industry Insider — Texas that his city’s offices will continue to work on legacy system replacements and cloud migration. Departments included in the efforts are the Information Technology Services Department (ITSD), police, development, health, transportation, animal care, 311, finance, budget and HR. The city’s ITSD budget for FY24 is about $89 million and the capital projects budget is about $27 million.

Dallas CIO Bill Zielinski told Industry Insider — Texas that his city is working on digital equity and middle-mile broadband infrastructure. In addition, the city is refreshing its core financial services system, and the land management and permitting system is in flight. The city’s 2022-23 IT budget was about $140 million.

Austin’s previous CIO, Chris Stewart, shared the city’s five-year strategic planning, which includes project management and procurement. The plan has multiple projects mapped out, including establishing standards for secure data collection, storage and sharing while using open-source technologies, mobile-ready web applications and proven agile project methodologies to improve how the city manages projects and information. Kerrica Laake was named the city CIO in August.

Fort Worth CTO Kevin Gunn talked last month about the city’s private-public partnership with Sprocket Networks that will build a 300-mile fiber network during the next three years, bringing economic growth, residential connectivity and the opportunities that reliable Internet can bring to the populace. He shared that the city wants to attract “Internet-focused businesses” and to bring digital equity to all residents. The project is estimated at $65 million.