Yale University plans on building out a new fiber optic internal communications network for its 500 facilities. Thanks to a new working relationship between the city and the university, the Harp administration sees the school’s infrastructure upgrades as an opportunity to learn best practices and achieve economies of scale for developing its own new fiber-based communication system sometime in the near future.  

That update came Friday from Controller Daryl Jones, who also heads the city’s information technology (IT) department, during a biweekly meeting of department heads held in the mayor’s conference room on the second floor of City Hall.

The primary subject of the hour-long meeting was the city’s next interdepartmental neighborhood sweep, this one planned for the Hill North on Wednesday, Sept. 26 and Thursday, Sept. 27.  

The fourth such city-led sweep, following up on similar endeavors in Newhallville, Fair Haven, and the Annex over the past year, will see economic development officials, anti-blight and building inspectors, and a variety of other city personnel comb through around 10 square blocks between Congress Avenue, Ward Street, Sylvan Avenue, and Winthrop Avenue in the Hill. They’l look out for blighted homes, broken sidewalks, unlicensed businesses, and other quality-of-life concerns.  

Friday’s meeting, chaired by Mayor Toni Harp, brought together two dozen department heads and other high-ranking city officials to review a wealth of carefully plotted, block-by-block statistics about Hill North in an attempt to use the geographic information system (GIS)-plotted data to inform where city officials should focus during the latest neighborhood walk. Some of the data reviewed included automobile collisions going back to 2015, owner-occupied homes vs. properties run by absentee landlords, and locations of SeeClickFix reports.  

As the department heads planned for the walk ahead and discussed follow-up items for previous neighborhood sweeps, Jones also updated the group on new developments in the city’s IT department.