St. Albert is deeply involved in the upcoming Alberta Smart City Symposium.
The City of St. Albert is a founding member of the Alberta Smart City Alliance, along with the University of Alberta and the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and technology industry giants IBM Canada and Cisco Systems.
In mid-April, several city staff members, mostly from the senior levels, will venture to Banff for the second symposium put on by the alliance. The first was held in September 2014 at the Enjoy Centre.
“I think for St. Albert it’s a multi-faceted benefit,” said Travis Peter, the City of St. Albert’s smart city manager and the chair of the symposium’s organizing committee said.
“For St. Albert, it’s a profile piece,” he said. It can help benefit St. Albert’s municipal reputation, he said, but it can also help draw attention to the city in the smart city and technology industries.
“We’re a big part of the Alberta Smart City Alliance, and as a part of that and as a part of building the market and advancing the research and so forth, St. Albert’s taking a bit of a leadership role there,” he said.
Smart city initiatives are about using data and technology to help run municipalities better, whether it’s helping make traffic flow more efficiently or having open data initiatives. St. Albert has been working on a smart city master plan with a committee, and other cities, like Edmonton, have developed their own departments and approaches to adapt changing technology for municipal use.
St. Albert – both representatives of the city but also several residents – is well represented on the symposium’s speakers list.
Coun. Cathy Heron will be giving a talk about St. Albert’s smart city master plan, a draft of which should be in front of council later this spring.
Peter said that master plan is eagerly awaited by other communities, who may use St. Albert’s plan as a jumping off point for their own smart city approaches.
Chris Dambrowitz is the associate vice president of research and innovation at NAIT. NAIT is another of the founding partners of the alliance.
“We’re excited to be part of the alliance,” Dambrowitz said. He said he sees the alliance as a whole to give municipalities a chance to think about how new technologies can be used.
“I think the symposium itself is going to be a really good snapshot of what’s out there, what’s possible for communities of different sizes, and the questions that are really tough for individual communities to address might be more easily taken on and solved where municipalities identify they have the same challenge as each other and figure out how to solve it collectively,” he said.
About 10 City of St. Albert staff will be attending the symposium, Peter said.
Some are attending the conference, some are part of the presentations, some are volunteers going on their own time, one is the master of ceremonies, and others are part of the event’s administration team.
The Alberta Smart City Alliance is covering the costs for several of the city attendees, such as the master of ceremonies, the event administration team, speakers and the volunteers.
The economic development department is also hosting a booth at the symposium as part of the city’s sponsorship deal with the event. Peter said the commitment for that is about $1,500, and the city employee that’s assigned to the booth would have their registration and meals covered by the event.
Peter said the expected cost to the city to send members of administration to the event is between $1,500 and $2,000, with travel costs to be determined as logistics and the possibility for shared transportation are still being considered. Travel costs could add as much as $1,300 to the total, he said.
