| Department | Challenge Description |
| Office of Historic Preservation | The Office of Historic Preservation has worked to established itself as a resource for owners of aging or historic buildings. We frequently receive inquiries on how to make existing structures more energy efficient, especially in our warming climate. Often, the initial thought from property owners is to remove original materials, but research has proven that less invasive retrofits provide a greater return on investment while aiding in efficiency. This also prevents the detriments of unnecessary construction waste, which is the largest single-stream waste source in the United States. The challenge is to develop an open access website, app, or tool that calculates the carbon footprint of renovation projects and suggests ways to make an existing or older home greener through adaptation strategies. This challenge is in direct response to the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan locally and the global challenge of climate change. Through this challenge, we hope to provide a fun, interactive, and accessible tool that helps quickly quantify or visualize the outcomes of various available energy efficiency interventions, including: investment cost versus rate of return; energy and water use impact; and total overall life cycle impact, from resource extraction to manufacturing to installation to projected end of life. This tool could also serve as a central bank for resources and service providers for energy upgrades, including city programs. We think this tool could help the city meet CAAP goals and empower property owners with the knowledge to make the best decisions possible for the longevity of their investment. |
| Solid Waste Management | The Solid Waste Management Department (SWMD) has 725 employees and travels over 7 million miles annually. Of these employees, 485 have a commercial driver’s license. Although there are laws, directives, and departmental policies that prohibit distractive behavior we routinely catch employees with their cell phones, reading maps, or eating food while driving. These behaviors place the City of San Antonio at great risk. The reason we catch these occurrences is we have an onboard solution that detects sudden impacts or braking and records the event. However, these are only the events that have a sudden shock or deceleration. We would like to identify all the other occurrences that may be happening where a driver is taking their eyes off the road. The more time a driver’s eyes are away from the road, the higher the risk. SWMD would like a solution that could identify these high-risk drivers and how much distractive driving is taking place in order to take corrective actions before an accident or near miss occurs. |
| Solid Waste Management | The City of San Antonio’s Solid Waste Management Department collects of 1 billion pounds of material each year. The material is collected and taken to various facilities to be recycled, composted, or landfilled. Each truck load of material generates a disposal ticket from the facility. These tickets are provided to the drivers and manually inputted by SWMD staff to document the information. The desire is to eliminate the manual process and implement a solution that would automate the capture of the ticket information. This will increase accuracy, minimize lost tickets, and improve efficiencies. The solution should consider optical scanners with text recognition, RFID, or barcode scanners that will capture desired information such as tonnage, ticket number, truck mileage, and truck number to be stored in a database for reporting and performance tracking. |
| Solid Waste Management | The City of San Antonio’s Solid Waste Management Department (SWMD) services approximately 360,000 residents annually with one time a week of garbage, recycling, and organics collection. SWMD seeks a contamination detection tool that will identify and capture the dumped content. Additionally, it will provide the point of location of where the cart was serviced (latitude and longitude). This is an effort to create a pathway towards a more sustainable city, as the SWMD has set a goal to reach a 60% residential recycling rate by 2025. |
| ITSD/Office of Innovation | San Antonio residents & customers currently travel to a myriad of siloed websites to pay bills, update personal information, or request services. This challenge is for a mobile application that is a one-stop shop for services across City departments and partners. Respondents of this challenge are required to complete a design research phase that would identify which services are critical and most frequently used by San Antonio residents, and use cases for those services. The mobile application can start small, with a handful of services and provide a streamlined point of access for residents to interface with partners across City departments. The application must explore the infrastructure required to store, host and allocate appropriate access to data generated by users of the application with respect to the highest standards of privacy and security. The application can also explore potential revenue streams for the City and partners via the mobile application. This initiative will be incorporated with the mobile services effort provided through the City Hall To-Go program. |