CentralSquare Technologies, an industry leader in public sector technology, announced the winners of the second annual ENGAGE Awards, honoring municipalities and agencies across the public sector for best practices and achievements in building the safest and most well-run communities in North America.
This year, CentralSquare launched two new categories to further recognize the extraordinary efforts of dispatchers and teams driving community engagement. The Exemplary Service in 911 Award recognizes dispatchers who demonstrate exceptional action in the face of an emergency. The Citizen Experience Award focuses on the outstanding efforts of a municipality committed to utilizing citizen portals to engage their community.
“Citizen needs are constantly evolving, but our customers are always answering the call despite challenges with funding, infrastructure, workforce, cybersecurity, and more,” said Tim Boyle, Chief Customer Officer, CentralSquare. “While they can’t control how the world is changing, these agencies are controlling how they respond and adapt. Our customers perform extraordinary actions every day. They revolutionize operations, collaborate with other agencies, and above all, stay focused on the mission to serve the people in their communities, particularly when they need it most.”
The 2024 ENGAGE Awards were announced at CentralSquare’s ENGAGE user-community conference in Dallas, Texas with over 1,800 customers and partners in attendance.
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Exemplary Service in 911 Award: South Metro Fire Rescue Emergency Communications, CO
On June 22, 2023, when an EF1 tornado struck Highland Ranch, Colorado, South Metro Fire Rescue Communications played a vital role in safeguarding citizens and coordinating emergency response. Despite the Emergency Communications Center being in the tornado’s path, the team, led by Chris Carnahan, remained at their posts, triaging hundreds of calls for service based on severity and need. Backup systems were activated, including setting up CentralSquare’s remote Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) sessions on laptops in a secure location while the Incident Dispatch Team assisted with damage assessment, search and rescue, and mapping the destruction path via drone. This direct link between the incident commander and his team with the 911 center ensured no call went unanswered, enabled the efficient dispatch of resources, and provided on-scene support to help responders and citizens during this catastrophic incident.
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Citizen Experience Award: Tamarac, FL
Tamarac, Florida is a leader in technology with a vision for “Excellence Always”. They strive to continually improve the lives of its residents, by streamlining processes and creating an easier user experience for citizens and businesses’ online services. The city deployed official news channels and smart home technologies to provide residents with access to news, events, and other essential information, including the ability to pay bills. Tamarac is further supporting this mission by migrating to the newest CentralSquare Finance Enterprise, Community Development (CD), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Payments, and Citizen Engagement Software. As a result of these efforts to improve citizen services, Tamarac won first place in the 2023 Digital Cities award by the Center for Digital Government.
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Smart Safety Award: Austin, TX (CAD Division)
Austin Public Safety IT CAD team is making remarkable strides to enhance public safety and improve the lives of citizens. As the first to implement a multi-agency Enterprise CAD system, Austin is improving inter-departmental coordination and mutual aid across counties. The recent launch of CentralSquare’s Unify system further strengthens this collaboration, ensuring efficient and effective response in times of need. The team has won several awards for their trailblazing use of public safety technology, including the 2020 Civic Future Award and the 2022 Local Smart IT Innovation Award and acts as a resource, providing advice for how other agencies can enable interoperability in emergency response.
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Smart Community Award: Beverly, MA
Beverly, Massachusetts has been uniquely transforming the city’s cemetery management system to provide residents and decision-makers, including the mayor, with transparent and accurate information about work projects, incoming businesses, and street improvements. While traditionally used for creating, issuing, and managing building permits, the city is using CentralSquare’s CD permit module to manage current and historical burial records. By leveraging CD and EAM, Beverly is pioneering a novel approach to enhance city management and citizen services.
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Innovation Award: Pomona Police Department, CA
Pomona Police Department has saved considerable time and resources, reduced the margin of error for reporting, and eliminated the risk of lost reports by transitioning manual record management processes to a modern, paperless Records Management System (RMS) with CentralSquare. This has not only streamlined operations by allowing officers to submit reports from the field, but also affords officers more time serving in the community to strengthen relationships with citizens.
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Excellence in Resourcefulness Award: Region of Waterloo, ON, CAN
Managing over $7 billion in infrastructure assets, the Region of Waterloo has a goal to stand up a comprehensive asset investment planning (AIP) system to centralize management, optimize spending and resource allocation, and extend the lifespan of assets. To achieve this, Waterloo is using CentralSquare’s EAM alongside other integrated external systems to automate long-term financial planning to ensure efficient fund allocation, reduce manual paperwork, and better manage resources to serve citizens.
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User Group Award: Colorado Enterprise
The Colorado User Group for Enterprise (CAD and Records Management System (RMS) has been fundamental to the success of both products as members have provided valuable feedback on functionality and feature sets. The group has also endorsed CentralSquare, completed numerous online references, and hosted over twenty site visits for prospective CentralSquare customers in 2023. The user group remains steadfast in its collaboration with the CentralSquare community and recently partnered as an early adopter for the Enterprise RMS and Jail Management System integration, helping to evaluate new functions and features.
About CentralSquare Technologies
CentralSquare Technologies is the largest independent public sector software provider that powers all aspects of managing local government to build smarter and safer communities. Public sectors across North America use CentralSquare to enable efficiencies and a seamless end-to-end integrated experience by using innovative, cloud-based solutions and automation. CentralSquare’s scalable technology helps state and local agencies thrive operationally, even during states of emergency in public safety when every second counts. Its intuitive enterprise software also includes user-friendly platforms to support public administration agencies with finance, asset, compliance, case management and much more to drive better public experiences.
As the market driver for advancing safety and justice with innovative technology, CentralSquare serves 3 out 4 citizens across North America. The company is headquartered in Lake Mary, FL and has locations in North Carolina, South Dakota and British Columbia. More information is available at CentralSquare.com.
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