How Smart North Florida is using technology to help solve road, flooding, parking issues in Jacksonville area

By David Bauerlein
Florida Times Union

Clayton Levins once expected after graduation from Jacksonville University that his path would take him to the pulpit. As it turned out, he's an evangelist of a different kind, spreading the word in the Jacksonville area about how local governments can use technology to help take on the most pressing problems facing them. 

Levins, 30, is the executive director for Smart North Florida, an organization he describes as a "start-up for start-ups." "It has been an amazing journey," he said. "I had no idea this would be a landing spot." Google "innovation" along with the name of a major city and that Internet search will likely show a hit for some kind of center or hub. In Jacksonville, it's Smart North Florida.

In one of the non-profit organization's most recent initiatives, it set up the Neptune Beach Resilience Lab in tandem with the city of Neptune Beach, taking aim at quantifying the impact of climate change on coastal communities. The partnership hooked up with StormSensor, a start-up firm based in Seattle, to install technology in March that captures data about how rising sea level affects the ability of stormwater systems to carry rainwater and curb flooding.

In another use of sensors, Smart North Florida is working with the state Department of Transportation for the deployment of technology developed by Trainfo for tracking train and automobile traffic at railroad crossings. Smart North Florida started in-house at the North Florida Transportation Planning Organization and became its own stand-alone organization in 2021 when it hired Levins as executive director last September.

The North Florida TPO provided a two-year financial commitment of seed money. The first year of support is $75,000. Smart North Florida also took a shot this year at gaining financial support from the state for expanding such organizations statewide, but that hit a dead end in the Legislature. State Rep. Wyman Duggan, R-Jacksonville, filed legislation that would have enabled organizations like Smart North Florida to earn designation by Enterprise Florida as a "smart region zone center for excellence." Duggan said he decided to file the bill (HB 385) after seeing how the North Florida TPO uses technology through its Regional Transportation Management Center to improve traffic flow while collecting data that policy-makers can use for their long-range decisions. "It's incredibly impressive," Duggan said. "It's like the emergency operations center and Mission Control at NASA all rolled into one. The way they're able to take and synthesize all this data and make predictions, I just found it very intriguing." Duggan said that's a model that can be used in other ways to improve governmental decision-making and operations. "They connected the dots, if you will," he said. Levins said government has not kept up with the pace of technological change in the same way private businesses have. "It's trying new things," he said. "It's as simple as that." His own career so has had its share of trying new things.

At Jacksonville University, he majored in communications and was a pitcher for the baseball team. After graduation in 2014, he worked as a ministry associate, a government affairs manager, a community relations coordinator, and as an  "innovation project specialist" at The Haskell Company's affiliate Dystruptek on his way to the job at Smart North Florida.

Levins said the wide range of possibilities for using technology is what attracted him to the Smart North Florida job. He said rather than having a career that specializes in one area, he considers himself a generalist who can "learn a little of something about everything."

It's not the first time Jacksonville has tried to get a foothold in technology-inspired development. The city created the Duval County Research and Development Authority in 2008 but plans for a First Coast Technology Park near University of North Florida never really got off the ground. 

Jacksonville has had the "Bay Street Innovation Corridor" on the drawing board for a few years. The centerpiece of that corridor would be the Jacksonville Transportation Authority's plan, called the Ultimate Urban Circulator, for automated vehicles that can transport passengers at street level as well as on the elevated structure now used for the Skyway trains.

The U.S. Department of Transportation awarded a $12.5 million grant in 2018 to help JTA do the Bay Street Innovation Corridor.

Smart North Florida is working with the city St. Augustine on carrying out its Smart St. Augustine master plan. The city installed solar-powered trash bin compactors on St. George Street in 2019 and has a ParkStAug app to pay for parking spaces using their mobile phones.

In Jacksonville, Smart North Florida worked with LISC Jacksonville on innovation in the property appraisal process for homeowners in the Eastside neighborhood where residents face challenges in building generational wealth.

Clay County, Nassau County, Neptune Beach and Keystone Heights use the RoadBotics mobile app that uses cell phones mounted on government vehicles to take photos of road pavement conditions. Those photos are fed through artificial intelligence programs to help government plan for the timely repairs of and maintenance.

In the grand scheme of what government does on a daily basis throughout Northeast Florida, the work by Smart North Florida is a drop in the bucket. But Levins said the approach can be replicated and expanded by taking advantage of new technology and sharing the vast volume of data that's already collected in various formats.

"When you talk about innovation, there's something in the way of creative problem-solving that's really attractive to me," he said. "It's this idea you can take new concepts and tackle really difficult problems."