Beaconsfield aims to improve dialogue with residents with Smart Cities cash

Beaconsfield has wisely opted to be part of a group bid in the Smart Cities Challenge, a federal program launched last fall that includes a potential $80 million in seed grants for the top innovative ideas.

Beaconsfield announced last Friday that it has joined with the municipalities of Brossard, Châteauguay, Delson, Magog, StBasile-leGrand, Ste-Catherine, St-Constant and St-Lambert, in collaboration with the B-CITI firm, to submit an application to the Smart Cities Challenge (collectiveideas.ca). The top prize is $50 million. There will be two prizes of up to $10 million awarded to cities with fewer than 500,000 residents, plus a $5-million prize for cities with fewer than 30,000 residents.

Finalists will be announced this summer and the winners will be named by mid-2019. The finalists will be provided with about $250,000 to elaborate on their concepts before the winners are selected next spring.

Beaconsfield officials hope that joining a group of municipalities and working in conjunction with B-CITI will improve their chances of being part of a winning bid and perhaps the recipient of a larger grant.

Mayor Georges Bourelle said their bid would tackle what could be described as an “intelligent city” communication platform.

“A city that can have twoway communication with its residents,” he said. “An online approach where residents could feed back to us their expectations or their reactions to things we do. We would be able to really have, on an ongoing basis, a dialogue with our residents.”

Infrastructure Canada’s Smart Cities program aims to improve the overall quality of citizens’ lives, said city clerk Nathalie Libersan-Laniel.

“It has to be based on a platform ... where you can add different ideas,” she said. “An important criteria is to foster community interaction ... and to break the isolation of residents.”

Improving communication is an ongoing challenge facing municipalities, especially when it comes to receiving feedback from residents, Bourelle noted.

That fact will be the motivation behind the design of the platform.

“(The platform) could deal with all (city) services, such as online tax billing,” Bourelle said. “It could be a kind of a ‘closed’ Facebook … for the city to communicate with its residents.”

The hope is the group’s “bold and innovative” ideas, which are now being finalized, will land them some federal prize money.

“If you produce a winning bid, it can be very lucrative for the participating cities,” Bourelle said.

“You have the money to develop all these ideas to improve the quality of life and communication with residents.”

It seems like thinking outside of the box is an imperative.

“The only limit is our imagination — our creativity,” the mayor said.

A winning bid must be based on a universal concept that could be adopted in other Canadian municipalities, Libersan-Laniel noted. A proposed solution could be to facilitate online access for residents to various city services, she said.

Bourelle pointed out that Beaconsfield’s pay-as-you-throw system for garbage management, in place for two years now, is a fine example of a smart city practice. It’s a mechanical garbage collection system where each household is given a grey rolling bin with an electronic reader. The reader determines whether a resident is to be charged for any extra pickups. One dozen pickups per year are included in the basic garbage tariff.

Beaconsfield and its partners are preparing to make their joint application by April 24.

The city is encouraging residents and local businesses to submit their own “outside the box” ideas this week through an online survey that can be found at collectiveideas.ca/form.

(The platform) could deal with all (city) services, such as online tax billing. It could be a kind of a ‘closed’ Facebook … for the city to communicate with its residents.