TITLE
Recommendation to request City Attorney, in coordination with the Technology and Innovation and the Public Works Departments, to draft an ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code to require the installation of communications infrastructure in excavation projects in the public right-of-way where the City has determined that it is both financially feasible and consistent with the City's long-term goals of furthering economic opportunity through connectivity.
DISCUSSION
BACKGROUND:
Municipalities across the region, state and nation are continuously undertaking "smart" initiatives with a focus on leveraging technology and improving infrastructure to create a better place to live, work and visit, and certainly Long Beach is a leader in this urban innovation movement. At the intersection of people, communities, businesses and government is the need for infrastructure to keep pace with growing populations and which better position cities to advance economic development opportunities and conditions.
The City of Long Beach has already begun to initiate high-tech infrastructure and intelligent governance projects through our in-house Innovation Team (i-team) and the Technology and Innovation Department (TID) in the development of a Citywide Fiber Optic Network Deployment Plan, which was released as a Request for Proposal (RFP) in December 2015. The overarching goal of this master plan is to invest in the City's high tech infrastructure to promote economic, social, civic and workforce development.
As outlined in the City's recent proposal for the U.S. Department of Transportation's Smart City Challenge, over the past decade Long Beach has installed over sixty-three (63) miles of fiber optic cable and also envisions building the backbone of a high tech city by constructing a fiber optic connection to the CoreSite One Wilshire (LA 1) data center in downtown Los Angeles. This is the West Coast's largest telecommunication hub and customer ecosystem and is ...
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