Join us for a 2.5-day conference filled with strategies, tools, connections, and all the things you need to drive your community better, faster, and further in 2020.
Register for the 2020 ICMA West Coast Regional Conference
Reconnecting to the Waterfront: The Story of Redevelopment in Vancouver
Wednesday, March 18 | 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
The Vancouver Waterfront Redevelopment Project is a story of persistence that took over 12 years just to break ground. This unique private-public partnership (PPP) opened ground on Phase 1 of its construction just a year ago. Participants are encouraged to wear comfortable shoes on this walking workshop.
(There is an extra fee associated with this event: $25)
We've Always Done It That Way is Over: Transforming from the Status Quo to the Status Go
Wednesday, March 18 | 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Government organizations are often encouraged to institutionalize best practices, freeze them into place, focus on execution, stick to their knitting, increase predictability, and get processes under control. However, today government leaders face a radically shifting context for the workforce, the workplace, and the world of community building. To move forward toward better government, leaders must be vigilant and disrupt the fossilized mental model of “we’ve always done it that way” and replace it with a forward-looking approach to continuous improvement and transform their workplace culture from the status quo to the Status Go!
Speaker:
- Patrick Ibarra, Co-founder, The Mejorando Group
You Don't Know What You're Missing: Making the Most of Your ICMA Benefits
Wednesday, March 18 | 4:45 pm - 5:45 pm
Join your ICMA Regional Director for a lively, interactive session on the benefits of membership in ICMA. You are guaranteed to learn about one new ICMA resource! This session will allow participants to network and share their favorite benefit of membership. Be part of the conversation!
Keynote Session: Managing Cybersecurity Risks and Resources to become a Smarter City Against Urban Cyber Terrorism and Why City Size Doesn’t Matter
Thursday, March 19 | 9:00 am - 10:00 am
This session will focus on why cities have significant risks relating to cyber security regardless of city size and why many need a road map to start the process of securing the countless risk points in the journey to become a Smarter City. This session will cover such things as What must your city and its leaders do to become a smarter city to combat urban cyber terrorism?, Why what you don't know can hurt your city and its residents; Why every city is vulnerable and why cyber insurance is not the answer.
Speakers:
- Barry Schalkle, JD, CPA, co-founder Protocol 46 Inc., a veteran-owned military intelligence inspired cybersecurity company
- Cy Olsen, PhD, CEO of NetOC Inc, (Networking Organizational Capabilities)
West Coast Roundtables
Thursday, March 19 | 10:15 am - 11:15 am
Making Sense of AI: How Cities Use Tech to Turn Community Feedback On Its Head
Thursday, March 19 | 10:15 am - 11:15 am
Learn how the cities of Renton, Pasco, and Camas, WA embrace AI and data as tools for understanding their less vocal community members and building better policies and services. You'll walk away with actionable applications for your own city and a better understanding of AI and data's overall potential in the context of local government.
Speakers:
- Robert Harrison, Chief Administrative Officer, City of Renton, Washington
- Cathy Huber Nickerson, Finance Director, City of Camas, Washington
- Dave Zabell, City Manager, City of Pasco, Washington
- Hannah Levenson, Director of Marketing, Zencity
Surviving a Polarizing Issue: Addressing Homelessness in a Diverse Community
Thursday, March 19 | 10:15 am - 11:15 am
Learn from the City of Fremont’s experience managing the polarizing approval process of a Housing Navigation Center (HNC) and apply the lessons to challenging issues in your community. Homelessness increased 21% in the City of Fremont from 2017 to 2019 as part of the greater homelessness crisis in California. The City developed a multipronged strategy to address the crisis including a proposed a Housing Navigation Center. The Center is an innovative shelter model focused on helping individuals find housing. The proposal received unprecedented community reaction and required extensive staff support to receive, process, and analyze the feedback. Community sentiment shifted quickly during the process especially as activist websites and social media played a significant role in shaping the conversation. Throughout the summer City Staff navigated difficult conversations, community distrust, and cultural differences while the project moved forward on an accelerated timeline. Staff prepared three of the largest community workshops in city history to receive feedback and provide accurate information. Hear how staff handled the thousands of responses from the public while balancing councilmember needs and concerns. Learn how the experience has shaped communications and project management going forward and how those lessons can be applied to other communities and topics.
Speaker:
- Candice Rankin, Local Government Management Fellow, City of Fremont, California
West Coast Roundtables
Thursday, March 19 | 1:45 pm - 2:45 pm
Leadership Lessons Learned as a 911 Dispatcher
Thursday, March 19 | 1:45 pm - 2:45 pm
“911 What is your emergency?” While many people have heard these words on TV, very few have had said them to thousands of people as part of their job. With a career that spans the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, Cory Poris Plasch has had a variety of professional experiences but still draws every day from the lessons she learned at the very beginning of her career as a 911 dispatcher. With the perspective earned through talking people through extraordinary trials including the mass shooting at Northern Illinois University as well as everyday challenges, Cory shares with her audience leadership skills that can be applied every day to a career in local government.
Speaker:
- Cory Plasch, Vice President of Customer Success, Polco
Lessons Learned from Loss of All Electricity During Public Safety Power Shutoff Events
Thursday, March 19 | 1:45 pm - 2:45 pm
When the US's largest utility decides it needs to shutdown electricity to millions of customers covering a large swath of urban to suburban cities for multiple consecutive days, what could go wrong? Come learn from our experience. To avoid a possible wildfire ignition, power was cut to miles of cellphone towers, sewer and water pumps, gas pumps, traffic lights, home medical devices, and refrigeration. Lessons learned include how to evaluate your city's current readiness for loss of power and how a total electrical shutdown over multiple days will impact your community differently from a brief storm outage or localized natural disaster. Session participants will learn how communities are preparing for more frequent, longer duration, and larger areas impacted by electricity outages, using the example of electricity shutdowns now predicted for each summer and fall for the next ten years covering miles of California.
Speaker:
- Heather Abrams, General Manager, Tamalpais Community Services District
Manage Change Before It Manages You
Thursday, March 19 | 1:45 pm - 2:45 pm
This session provides a brief historical overview and contextual review of organizational change management (OCM), and then how the process can be applied in the public-sector setting of local government. Municipal government, in America, is a unique form of governance that needs to be understood differently that state and federal government models, let alone those of private-sector or quasi-governmental structures.
Speaker:
- Richard Carson, Former City Manager, Author of Book of Change
The EPA Decision Integration for Strong Communities (DISC) Application: A Tool to Support Community Resilience and Well-Being
Thursday, March 19 | 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
EPA’s Region 10 and Office of Research and Development collaborated with Oregon and Washington communities on a Sustainability Snapshot Project. The project has taken an iterative, agile development approach to tailor existing indicators to the needs of small communities. The resulting “dashboard” is called “Decision Integration for Strong Communities” or DISC. It has been designed to encourage smart growth and offer relevant and readily-available information. DISC is a downloadable application of existing indicators that offers relevant, local (county) and readily-available information to assist smaller communities to address their resilience/development goals.
This presentation describes DISC and walks though the features of DISC for potential users. The application represents an overall community well-being/resilience profile, as well as component scores for community characteristics relating to the topic areas of interest. If communities have more local specific information, they can substitute their data and tailor the application to their specific needs. The DISC application provides on-going information and spurs conversation about the actions a community can take and helps track the beneficial community impacts of work being done towards attaining local priorities. This presentation invites potential users to evaluate DISC and offer suggestions to enhance its ability to offer useful information to promote community vitality.
Speaker:
- David Olszyk, Research Ecologist, US EPA/CPHEA/PESD
ICMA Code of Ethics Renewal
Thursday, March 19 | 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Join members of the ICMA Committee on Professional Conduct to provide feedback on the relevancy of Tenets 8 (Competency) and Tenet 11 (Personnel). This is part of ICMA’s ongoing review and renewal of the Code of Ethics. Led by Peter Troedeson, City Manager, City of Albany, Oregon and ICMA RVP.
Building a Connected, Inclusive Community: Chula Vista's Digital Equity Action Plan
Friday, March 20 | 9:00 am - 9:30 am
As the San Diego region adopts smart city initiatives at city and regional levels, the employment market has shifted toward digital skills and technology and is becoming more prevalent in communities. However, not everyone has access to Internet connectivity, to devices or to the necessary digital literacy skills to fully participate in this digital transformation.
To address this gap, or the digital divide, the City of Chula Vista has developed a Digital Equity and Inclusion Plan, containing 3 goals, 8 objectives, and 38 strategic actions to improve digital equity in the City, with dedicated support to uplift 8 identified underserved communities who are most impacted by the digital divide today. This plan builds upon the goal of being a “Connected City,” framed by the City’s Smart City Strategic Action Plan. By embedding digital equity into the smart city program, Chula Vista is expanding the impact of technology adoption and creating opportunities for the entire community to engage with the City's digitally inclusive future.
Join smart city leaders and digital equity champions from Chula Vista in a discussion about making our cities more inclusive and equitable.
Speaker:
- Melanie Nutter, Principal, Nutter Consulting
How to Modernize the Customer Service Experience with 24/7 Support Services
Friday, March 20 | 9:30 am - 10:00 am
County, state, and federal development regulations, processes and procedures can be difficult to navigate and comprehend. Placer County has streamlined the complex permit process, by providing access to all services and specific information through a modernized customer experience with 24/7 support services, including the first California county chatbot application on multiple platforms (Google, Alexa, and a web user interface). Placer County became the first California county to not only deploy an artificial intelligence/machine learning chatbot program on the Google Cloud Platform but was also the first California county to have a chatbot application on multiple platforms (Google, Alexa, and a web user interface). The chatbot programs provide CDRA customers real-time integration with Placer County’s GIS application as it delivers zone and parcel information as well as specific development standards. Customers now have a multitude of question and answer scenarios available with a combination of static and dynamic questions and are expanding daily. Implementation of eServices has delivered a package of online self-service systems that empower customers and CDRA staff to complete most routine service requests quickly and simply resolving most common questions without needing to speak directly with staff.
Speaker:
- Shawna Purvines, Principal Planner, Placer County, California
Human Centered Design: More Than Buzzwords
Friday, March 20 | 9:00 am - 11:00 am
Speakers:
- Alicia Giudice, Senior Planner, City of San Rafael, California
- Judi Brown, Co-founder and Chief Impact Officer, CivicMakers
