Internet and Connectivity

Question: In the City of Gardner, everybody likes tech. They like their phones, they like their internet. What has the City of Gardner done with respect to expanding internet, expanding the connectivity in the city, you know, for the city itself, and then using tech to expand services for residents?

Answer: I mean, we try to expand access to tech, particularly with internet access. A couple of years ago, working with Congressman Lord Trahan’s office, we were able to get Comcast to expand its services up to the Kelton, Stone, and Raymond Streets areas of the city. Those are the last areas of the city that needed access to broadband internet, so we are now fully broadband in the city, which in 2020, to have any location in the city that didn’t have access to broadband was just something that we were just behind on. So being able to fix that was great back in the 2020-2021 timeframe, but also when our students were remote, we saw where people had access to internet and where they didn’t based off of when our students were able to log into their classes. And so when our students went back to the school, we kept that data and we figured out how was the best to use that to best plan moving forward. So you know, working with Gateway Fiber, the new internet company, to come in with a new internet option for places in the city, providing free Wi-Fi through Gateway Fiber at Monument Park and the Greenwood Pool, and having that currently be under construction, bringing Starlink internet to places like the Transfer Station and the Gardner Airport so that people now have internet access over there, makes it, one, so people have access to the internet, but also, two, we can improve our city services there, too. We can look at things like online payments. We can look at things like online reporting, rather than, you know, getting away from the handwritten paper stuff to a direct report. Working with our building department to use online inspection software through different tablet systems that we have so that the inspection report is automatically uploaded to our OpenGov permitting software with actual pictures from the inspection so that people can actually see what it is people are looking at. Working with the Code Red system that we make sure that people receive notifications as easily as possible. Increasing the city’s YouTube page so that people can see all of our public meetings and really bring more, as much transparency as possible because now people can watch those meetings at any moment at any time that works for them by just going onto the city’s YouTube page. So there’s a lot that we’ve done with technology to just increase what we’re doing.

Text from the 2023 interview on Interactive Services

Question: Now, let’s talk about interactive services specifically, improving the availability of interactive services has been a goal you’ve publicly expressed. What has Gartner achieved in this regard and what do you see coming down the pike?

Answer: Well, one of the things that we’ve achieved so far, Werner, is through our viewpoint online permitting system where we can bring the services of City Hall into the comfort of your home on a 24-7 basis. If you want to apply for a building permit, a health permit, something in the clerk’s office now that we’re trying to do that with the dog licenses, you can do that from the comfort of your home. You don’t have to worry about, is City Hall open? How am I going to get there? What do I need for this? It’s all available right there online. By doing something like that, we just make it so it’s easier for people and that’s the thing is we want to make the processes here as easy as possible. No one wants to come to City Hall and, you know, get confused. But if we can make it so that confusion goes away because it makes a complicated procedure more understandable, then we make it so that people have an idea of why we’re doing what we’re doing as well and feel like they can do it on their own. Hopefully, we’ll be able to integrate that into more than just those three departments that we have it in in the long term.

Question: When you do implement more interactive services, do you find that there is a greater compliance with people, for example, renewing their licenses on time?

Answer: Absolutely, yeah. We definitely get a lot more in than when we have to use to mail everything out and do everything over paper. It just makes it so much easier.