142 Business View Magazine - June 2016
plow trucks to compliment an aging fleet. This addi-
tion allowed DPW to re-organize the operational pro-
gram resulting in the creation of additional “narrow”
routes which serviced the additional 100 +/- second-
ary roads.”
Daryl Jones is the city’s Comptroller, responsible for
its budget and fiscal performance. “We’ve done a lot
of structural changes within the city to improve its ef-
ficiency,” he says, “one, being switching to all new soft-
ware. For instance the City moved from GroupWise/
Novell (email system) to Microsoft Office 365 with
VOIP which is the first city in the state to do so. We did
that to save money and to provide better services to
our residents. Financially, the city has taken the ap-
proach of balancing its budget over the last two years.
We’re expected to balance our budget, this year, as
well. We’ve built up a surplus. Currently, we have no
internal deficits. In the span of the last twelve months,
we’ve increased our bond rating from all three rating
agencies, which has improved our financial condition
in comparison to other cities in the state, and the
state, itself.
“We have firehouse software which helps manage
overtime, schedules, and reporting for the fire depart-
ment.” According to Carter, the new technology im-
provements have helped save the city millions of dol-
lars in the department’s overtime pay. “We also are
close in finishing a fleet maintenance program which
allows us to track all the maintenance work done on
vehicles,” Jones continues. “We’re also adding GPS on
the vehicles so we can track them around the city as
a way of providing safety, and managing and notifying
the operators when maintenance is needed.
“With the police department, we created a System
Data Management System (SDMS) that allows us to
analyze all the data on one single platform so we can
better manage police operations in terms of overtime,
police deployment, and knowing where the crime is all
across the city. The SDMS will be expanded to pull
all our systems from around the city into one platform
where we can analyze, produce data sets, solve prob-
lems, and find correlations between things that are
going on in the city. And finally, by the end of this fall,
we’ll have a new website that will be presented to the
citizens.”
Finally, Zinn talks about upgrades to New Haven’s his-
toric Green, the city’s central square that was part of
its original nine-square settlement, and which today
serves as a central gathering place for concerts and
events. “As we’re looking at how the Green can be a
space for New Haven in the 21st century, we had to
