This week, the national City Manager conference was held in Kansas City, Missouri. I flew in Sunday and attended several seminars Monday and Tuesday on best practices being employed by other cities across the country. Below are the seminars I attended. As I have time, I’ll discuss in different posts some of the cool ideas being employed in other parts of the country and how they might be useful to us….
Targeted Neighborhood Revitalization – Discussion of Kansas City’s efforts to revitalize its urban core and the public/private partnership used to finance the efforts.
The How’s and Why’s of Police-Community Relations and Diversity – A great presentation by Stockton, CA’s Police Chief (white) and City Manager (African-American) and their collaboration to increase public trust and reduce violent crime in one of the most crime ridden cities in the US at the time.
Using Analytics to Grow Tourism Market Share – How to successfully recruit visitors to your city using analytics.
The Manager’s Role in Advancing Public Health Efforts – The role of local government in achieving public health and improving quality of life for all residents.
How to Immediately Less the Inequalities in your Community – Using publicly available data sources to map and analyze availability to city services and how to use that data to make improvements in service availability to all residents.
Meeting the Workforce Challenges of Tomorrow – A thorough discussion of the changing work force as baby boomers exit and the millennial generation becomes the largest generation in the work force.
Urban Redevelopment: Leveraging Public-Private Partnerships in Kansas City – This was a three hour bus tour of the city showing wide spread clearance and redevelopment of one distressed neighborhood, revitalization of a second existing neighborhood, and a clever re-use of an old school to become 50 new apartments (like maybe Lincoln School here?).
I came back with 16 pages of notes, so we have lots of material to have robust discussions on the continuing renewal and revitalization of Middletown! Have a great weekend.
