M Focus on: Technology
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Citizen solution will help Brook Park navigate technology By ANDREW MENTOCK | The Municipal
A few years ago, Thomas Dufour attended a Brook Park, Ohio, City Council meeting as an interested citizen and left with the realization that his local government needed his help. Council members were unsure of how to discover who owned the domain names for the city council’s website and deliberated on how to resolve the issue, ultimately hiring a private investigator to do so. “They didn’t know who had it or did the city pay for it,” Dufour said. “But all the information on it was private. So as a website developer, I’m sitting there, I’m hearing this argument, I kind of want to be like, ‘I can probably answer all these questions if somebody wants to talk to me about it.’ But it was a huge fight. “It got me wondering, ‘Is there anything in the city where if they have a technology-related question, if technology-related issues 34 THE MUNICIPAL | NOVEMBER 2020
come up or if there’s legislation that comes up, who evaluates that? Who is the point of contact within the city?’” This sparked an idea in Dufour: What if there was a collection of residents to advise the Brook Park mayor, currently Mike Gammella, and city council on technology-related inquiries? He spoke with members of the city council, drafted legislation, handed it off to council member Brian Poindexter, who made some changes and began working to get it enacted. With an unanimous vote, the bill was passed at a Nov. 19, 2019, city council meeting, which created Brook Park’s Technology and Innovation Committee. It consists of five members: the mayor, a