Adapting Government Operations with Innovative Solutions

Eric Hayden, Director of Technology and Innovation and CIO, City of Tampa

Eric Hayden, Director of Technology and Innovation and CIO, City of Tampa

In the spirit of emergency management, one may imagine lots of special vehicles with flashing lights and loud sirens, personnel in different types of hazmat suits running around chaotically and neighborhoods in disarray listening and reaching out to anyone who can help shed light on the situation. During the pandemic, a new form of emergency unfolded that brought about a different type of hazard many were unprepared for. The classic timeline of an emergency includes an event, such as a storm approaching, alert and informational communications, damage from the event, recovery activities after the event passes and continual public communications until all is back to normal. What if there was no storm, no physical damage, but something so widespread that a neighborhood or business may as well have been decimated by a tornado? Or something we don’t think of often, the local government not being able to meet to conduct daily business.

Hi, my name is Eric Hayden, Chief Technology Officer and Chair of our Continuity of Operations task force for the City of Tampa municipal government. The COOP task force is a subcommittee within our Office of Emergency Management. The pandemic drove all our planners and government officials to rewrite portions of our continuity of government (COG) and continuity of operations plans (COOP) for situations where buildings and infrastructure were fine, however, new laws and medical guidance required our personnel not to be able to be within six feet of one another and abide by stringent protocols where we could not touch, or pass paper between each other or meet with citizens face to face in a normal fashion. Due to quarantines as well, citizens and our own City Council could not meet in their offices and chambers. As with any government, this vital legislative branch is elected by the community and oversees the business side of our government operations.

While the world was following new medical guidelines for handling COVID-19 and minimizing further spread, protocols came down daily on how to operate while more and more businesses were forced to shut down. For us, most of our fieldwork could continue as personnel were naturally distanced from others and we engaged in face masking and sanitization protocols to help prevent outbreaks of the virus. In the case of our internal office personnel, including our City Council, we could not legally or physically meet in our chambers or in public, which would cause a stop to governmental activities. We had only a few weeks to devise a strategy to recover our legislative business and resume governmental activities. Land use hearings, variances, new city ordinances and review and approval of financial agreements are vital for operation.

“Land use hearings, variances, new city ordinances and review and approval of financial agreements are vital for operation”

Since quarantining individuals, social distancing and sanitizing areas where people meet were the primary protocols for a long foreseeable time, our Convention Center came to the rescue with an idea. They suggested building a new council chamber for the public using a large meeting room they rent. Estimating that 100 to 200 public would need to visit in person and wait safely in chairs until their items are heard, the physics alone required a large space with chairs spaced no closer than six feet apart. The council members themselves had to be distanced apart at their desks equipped with computers and monitors to see agenda item materials before them. They also had to be present in front of everyone and we needed to solve audio and visual problems meeting in such a large space so everyone could hear and see what was occurring in real-time.

At the time, these were a common set of challenges across many agencies and businesses. Social distancing and face-to-face communication presented quite a problem for larger groups. In the end, through great collaboration and generosity from our Convention Center, their audio-visual contractor and our own internal broadcast cable channel team, we were able to build a large temporary public venue and quickly got our city council back in business. The secret sauce was joining our convention audio video technologies with a virtual meeting platform and then encoding the entire program and sending it back to our streaming platforms in our broadcasting control room. The large venue had dozens of speakers and microphones placed precisely so each council member could speak and be heard clearly in any corner of the room, including the outside overflow room. We set up two presenter podiums and a walk-up kiosk monitor and camera so the public could safely stand virtually in front of the council to conduct their business. The audio and video were piped inside and outside the new chambers and on the web as needed for remote public participation and subject matter experts who could not attend in person. Parking and access to the convention center also allowed for easier access to our council during this time as well.

The solution was unprecedented, to say the least. In the end, all ideas were listened to, which helped restore our legislative body successfully. Besides the open venue space, there was a lot of technology behind the scenes and operators to help coordinate the public instructing where to go and what to do. Internally, technicians mixed audio volumes and synced them with video so everyone could interact reasonably in real-time with each other and members of the DAIS. Our teams, our staff and the public came through working together to solve this enormous challenge. Today, it remains one of our best accomplishments for serving our public during an adverse time. As the pandemic fades into the past, our experience and partnerships with our departments, local businesses and our communities will always recall coming together when counties, states and local governments were counted on to continue the business of government.

As an ongoing benefit for our communities, our viewership and in-person participants increased with the added technology. Our public meetings are captioned and streamed live to the Internet, broadcast live to cable TV networks and we interact both in chambers and virtually with those few participants who cannot participate in person. A testament to managing emergencies is our council, which often says they don’t know how they did it before hybrid in-person meetings were created.

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