BATON ROUGE, LA — September 12, 2018 — Today, Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome announced that Baton Rouge has received the Center for Digital Government’s 2018 Government Experience Award.
The annual Government Experience Awards highlight best practices from states, counties, cities, and federal agencies or departments that have gone beyond the web to radically improve upon the experience of government and push the boundaries of how services are delivered. The Center for Digital Government awarded Baton Rouge fourth place in its “overall experience” category for the 2018 Government Experience Awards, recognizing the City-Parish’s focus on open data, online service delivery to citizens, and use of data and systems to support efforts such as blight analysis, traffic management, and overall community improvement.
“It is truly an honor to receive an award that reinforces our ongoing efforts to improve the experience that Baton Rouge citizens, businesses, and visitors have with our City-Parish government — an area of focus that has been a priority of mine since taking office,” said Mayor Broome. “Moving forward, I am committed to continue our use of technology and digital innovation wherever possible to create and deliver a best-in-class experience between our local government agencies and all those we serve on a daily basis.”
Over the past year, the City-Parish has made significant progress in establishing multiple avenues for digital services, citizen engagement, and data sharing, led by the launch of BRLA.gov in February 2018. The new City-Parish web platform replaced the former BRGov.com — a website that was more than 17 years old — with a modern design, mobile-friendly platform, streamlined navigation tools, real-time notification alerts via email and/or text, and emergency alert capabilities. The site was designed to complement the City-Parish’s Open Data BR portal, which continues support Baton Rouge’s standing as a leader among mid-sized cities for open data and transparency, including through the development of a dedicated transparency hub on BRLA.gov that provides easy access for citizens seeking information related to City-Parish transparency and open data initiatives.
Additionally, other recent digital initiatives or innovative programs are focused on establishing greater citizen access to services or information — from the Red Stick 311 app for requesting services or monitoring outstanding requests related to common public works related issues, to new approaches and tools that are being utilized to fight blight across East Baton Rouge Parish, to the City-Parish’s Vendor Self-Services portal for providing streamlined electronic access for vendors who do business or seek to do business with the City-Parish, to utilizing application programming interfaces (APIs) to enhance citizen connectivity to critical data such as near real-time traffic conditions and the EBRGIS mapping platform.
Baton Rouge joins other 2018 Government Experience Award winners honored as part of the overall city government experience category that include Louisville, Los Angeles, Tuscaloosa, San Diego, and Denver. Each of the 2018 Government Experience Award winners will be acknowledged as part of a full-day government experience academy held in Austin, Texas, on September 28, 2018.
This Government Experience Award comes as the latest acknowledgement of the City-Parish’s achievements in utilizing technology and digital innovation to create efficiencies in government operations, enhance service delivery, and improve governmental transparency. In 2017, Baton Rouge was named the fifth most digital city in the U.S. among mid-sized cities, and in April 2018, the City-Parish was named the winner of an IDC Smart Cities North America Award for its Public Safety Common Operational Platform (PSCOP), a digital application utilized by the Baton Rouge Police Department.
For more information on the 2018 Government Experience Awards and all of this year’s honorees, visit: http://www.govtech.com/cdg/digital-government-achievement/Government-Experience-Awards-2018-Winners-Announced.html