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coastal community of the future will be a city that is more physically, socially and economically
connected.
Funding for Norfolk’s proposed U.S. DOT Beyond Traffic projects will support Norfolk in
implementing its Resilience Strategy, as well as collaboration with other cities and private and
public partners – including Naval Station Norfolk and Port of Virginia - all which have a high stake
in Norfolk’s success. Since Norfolk experiences these challenges earlier than others, solutions in
Norfolk - a nexus of trade for the eastern third of the U.S. and a security center for the world -
will help other cities on the coast to improve resilience. Finding innovative, smart city solutions
focused on reducing risk and improving data-driven decisions in coastal cities (while replicable
and scalable to any city) is critical because more than 80% of the nation’s economy is supported
in coastal states; nearly 80% of U.S. import and export freight is transported through seaports;
and more than 50% of the population and U.S. economic activity are in coastal regions.
As demonstrated in the leverage section of this proposal, Norfolk has already begun to create
this new city through a series of funded and leveraged initiatives. Norfolk’s capacity to pilot
innovative strategies was demonstrated in January 2016 when Norfolk was selected as the third
highest national winner of the HUD’s National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC), securing
$120 million to continue implementing strategies to design the coastal community of the future
and capture the resilience solutions in a new Resilience Accelerator discussed in Section 5 of this
proposal. The USDOT project would complement/benefit and be bolstered by this project and its
partnerships among many other supporting initiatives underway in the city and the region.
c) Continuity of committed leadership and capacity to carry out the demonstration
Norfolk has successfully implemented a variety of projects similar in scale, scope and complexity
to those proposed in this application. In the past three years, the City’s Public Works has
managed $267 million in infrastructure projects, including construction of the flagship Slover
Library and the Courts Complex. Slover Library is among the most technologically advanced
public libraries in the country. The state-of-the-art Courts facility is a LEED-certifiable
(Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green building. Phase I grand opening was in
January 2015 and now houses General District Court and Circuit Court. Phase II is underway and
is estimated to be completed in 2017.
Projects managed by the City of Norfolk follow a set of standards to initiate and manage
individual projects. This methodology provides tools for use by the project manager containing
definitions, guidelines, and templates needed to deliver successful projects. The methodology
establishes common ground for all projects within the organization and the standards in this
methodology serve as assets to each team member and provide a common format for evaluating
progress toward project goals, objectives, and deliverables. The methodology encourages a top-
down approach to project management. It ties directly to the project life cycle phases and
project initiation process flow to provide a more precise definition of projects, a common
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lexicon used in project management, and a framework of activities mapped to each project class
size. It enables the tracking of progress against pre-determined metrics for reporting purposes.
d) A commitment to integrating with the sharing economy
The City of Norfolk is committed to integrating with the sharing economy demonstrated by the
development and support of the following initiatives:
The City developed a Bicycle and Pedestrian Strategic Plan, dated September 2015, and
initial implementation has included a Bike Sharing program.
Uber and Lyft are ride share services that are available and in use in the city
Hatch Accelerator, a public-private partnership startup accelerator program for
technology and entrepreneur community. This program launched in 2012 and continues
to be successful in growing entrepreneurial talent and retaining/ attracting that talent to
Norfolk.
Innovation Research Park, a collaboration between ODU and City of Norfolk that includes
business incubation and accelerator services to help companies in any stage of
development to achieve a competitive advantage.
City of Norfolk will launch a Coastal Resiliency Laboratory and Accelerator Center that will
serve as a nexus for technological, organizational and innovation around community
revitalization, water management, resilience measurement, port, Naval Station, and
other water-sector business related resilience challenges. Funding of $12 Million has
been allocated for this initiative.
The DOT Smart City Challenges Grant enables us to leverage our current sharing economy
initiatives and expand them to include: car sharing, autonomous vehicles, and data sharing. Data
sharing will open opportunities for the business and entrepreneur community in the following
areas: traffic management, nuisance flooding notification and avoidance, reuse and sharing of
services by citizens (peer to peer services), and health platforms to address patient
management. These innovations focus on the citizens rather than city process.
e) A commitment to making open, machine-readable data accessible, discoverable and usable by
the public to fuel entrepreneurship and innovation.
The City of Norfolk’s Chief Information Officer is developing our open data policy. Our open data
policy will provide a mechanism to break down the City’s departmental data silos and expose
important information to the public to better facilitate community engagement, transparency,
and build trust between the City and the residents it serves.
A vast variety and number of data sources are currently installed in the City, such as moving and
stationary sensors, and CCTV cameras. Coupled with the user interface data, such as cell phone
apps and text messages, as well as geo-location, the constantly growing data amounts may be
used to optimize flooded road management, public transit plan, predict congestion and flooding
impact on the road infrastructure and traffic pattern. Beyond the transportation impacts, the