#municipal-technology

#municipal-technology

Burning gas and propane for cooking, water heating and space heating in California homes and businesses creates 10% of the state's greenhouse gas emissions. It also releases pollutants indoors.

"We are now in the middle innings of the 5G era, and thankfully devices are getting more advanced and more affordable. Mission Telecom is proud to bring the best technology with the best pricing to our partners to help unlock new opportunities for nonprofits, schools, and libraries to take advantage of Mission Telecom's ultra-fast 5G network access."

Every city contains two transportation systems. One is the visible network of roads, rail lines, sidewalks, and bus routes mapped in planning documents. The other is the invisible geography of privilege and exclusion embedded within it: the neighborhoods that received highways instead of parks, the communities whose bus routes were cut, the sidewalks that abruptly end at the edge of a district.

Understanding the difference in purpose Unlike private businesses, which exist to make a profit, public institutions are designed to create impact - especially social and economic outcomes that benefit everyone, not just paying customers. A public agency doesn't measure its success in revenue or margins, but in how much it improves lives, builds equity and maintains public trust. This doesn't mean budgets and spending don't matter - they absolutely do - but money is not the goal. It's the tool.

Baron traces the origin story back to his time building high-scale systems at Instana (which exited to IBM in 2020), where the reality of "always-on" platforms made one thing obvious: the tooling we rely on is often too low-level, too rigid, and too disconnected from real-world use cases. That gap has only widened as environments have exploded in complexity-more cloud providers, more managed services, more hybrid setups, more internal APIs, and "gillions" of tools stitched together into brittle workflows.

Between the lines: This isn't benevolence. It's customer acquisition. Mayors don't just buy "AI." They buy cloud, data modernization, cybersecurity, services, and long-term support - the tech stack underneath any serious deployment. In return, cities get tools that could fix long-standing challenges, Cris Turner, vice president of government affairs at Google told Axios last June when it first released its playbook.