The City of Madison ranked #6 in the 250,000-499,999 population category by the Center for Digital Government , a national research and advisory institute focused on information technology policies and best practices in state and local government.

The City of Madison was recognized for developing digital government services to be sufficiently designed to reach community members and to improve how residents interact with government. Other recognitions include:

• Creating opportunities to expand the City’s digital engagement reach
• Strengthening the City’s cybersecurity posture
• Supporting citywide smart city efforts with a strong information technology infrastructure
• Providing a strong social media presence to the Madison community
• Continuing the modernization of paper based processes to digital processes

The City of Madison strives to make government more accessible and equitable for all. “We are honored to be named a Top 10 Digital City,” said Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway. “Digital inclusion is a top priority for the City of Madison, so that everyone in our city can thrive. I applaud City Information Technology for their continuing work toward this goal.”

Current projects include:

• Working with community partners to provide digital literacy trainings and low-cost devices
• Researching the opportunity and cost to implement a 311 system to improve accessibility to government agencies and services
• Conducting a feasibility study to plan out the expansion of broadband services at City public housing sites owned and operated by the Community Development Authority (CDA)
• Partnering with Community Development Authority (CDA) and ConnectHomeUSA to work toward narrowing the digital divide in CDA-assisted housing
• Implementing the purchase of new systems to administer the City’s legislative and learning management systems

“We are excited to be recognized as a 2019 Digital Cities winner,” said Sarah Edgerton, Information Technology Director for the City of Madison. “I am incredibly proud of Information Technology staff, as well as our agency partners, for their ongoing hard work in creating a more accessible, inclusive and secure government experience for all of Madison.”

Source: USDA

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development State Director Frank Frassetto announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is investing $1.4 billion in projects in 21 states to build and improve rural electric infrastructure.

“Modern and reliable electric infrastructure is a cornerstone to rural prosperity,” Frassetto said. “The funding USDA is providing is essential to rural Wisconsin and reflects our commitment to invest in critical infrastructure needs in rural communities. When rural America thrives, all of America thrives.”

USDA is providing financing through the Electric Loan Program. It will help build and improve 6,886 miles of line to strengthen reliability in rural areas. The loans include $255.8 million for investments in smart grid infrastructure that uses digital communications technology to detect and react to local changes in electricity usage.

In Wisconsin, Jump River Electric Cooperative is receiving a $11 million loan to connect 461 customers and build and improve 133 miles of distribution line to enhance system resilience and reliability. This loan includes nearly $1.5 million for smart grid technologies. Jump River is headquartered in Ladysmith and serves more than 9,000 members with over 1,769 miles of energized line.

USDA announced investments today in Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and Wisconsin. USDA will make additional funding announcements in coming weeks.

In April 2017, President Donald J. Trump established the Interagency Task Force on Agriculture and Rural Prosperity to identify legislative, regulatory and policy changes that could promote agriculture and prosperity in rural communities. In January 2018, Secretary Perdue presented the Task Force’s findings to President Trump. These findings included 31 recommendations to align the federal government with state, local and tribal governments to take advantage of opportunities that exist in rural America. Increasing investments in rural infrastructure is a key recommendation of the task force.

To view the report in its entirety, please view the Report to the President of the United States from the Task Force on Agriculture and Rural Prosperity. In addition, to view the categories of the recommendations, please view the Rural Prosperity infographic.

USDA Rural Development provides loans and grants to help expand economic opportunities and create jobs in rural areas. This assistance supports infrastructure improvements; business development; housing; community facilities such as schools, public safety and health care; and high-speed internet access in rural areas. For more information, visit www.rd.usda.gov/wi.

Source: Markets Insider

ParqEx announces a project with a locally-connected entrepreneurial hub, StartingBlock, and a pilot with the City of Madison at the City’s newest public parking garage at S. Livingston and Main Street, adjacent to the Spark Building at 821 E. Washington Avenue.

Chicago-based startup, ParqEx, led by serial entrepreneur Vivek Mehra is revolutionizing the real estate and transportation sectors at a national level. As more and more cities continue to use the ParqEx parking platform, people are noticing the positive impact.

The pilot will allow StartingBlock’s members – currently a community of over 250 members — to make parking reservations from the parking spots in the S. Livingston Garage that were allocated to StartingBlock. With ParqEx’s technology, StartingBlock members can make hourly or monthly parking reservations online or using the ParqEx app. The platform increases the number of users that can access StartingBlock’s limited parking allocation. Rather than a few persons having an assigned monthly permit in the traditional one car, one permit model, the ParqEx platform will allow any StartingBlock member to reserve parking online and through an app. “By sharing the monthly permits, the entire StartingBlock community can take advantage of cost-savings as well as greater flexibility,” explains StartingBlock Executive Director, Chandra Miller Fienen. With ParqEx, participating members can reserve parking for the times they need it, rather than locking it up for the full month.

Other advantages of ParqEx include a guest parking solution that allows members to make reservations for guests. Guests will receive a guess pass on their cell phone that will provide access to the garage, eliminating the inconvenience of dealing with reimbursements or sharing physical access cards. “The ParqEx solution allows a limited resource to be shared more fairly, efficiently, flexibly, and cost-effectively than the one-permit per car status quo,” says ParqEx CEO Vivek Mehra. ParqEx is a 2016 alum of the nationally ranked accelerator, gener8tor, which is headquartered at StartingBlock. Founded in 2014, ParqEx is the “Airbnb of parking” by allowing parking owners to rent their parking spots to drivers on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis. The StartingBlock-ParqEx pilot, which will allow StartingBlock members to access the spaces leased from the City at the South Livingston Street Garage as well as other parking locations on the platform, will be ParqEx’s largest community in Madison and the first at a public parking garage.

“The City of Madison is excited to continue its partnership with StartingBlock and participate in this pilot. We need more innovative solutions, especially around parking, to make our transportation system successful in the long term,” says Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway.

The pilot will provide StartingBlock with the opportunity to understand members’ parking trends and usage in a more robust and detailed way, and for the City to trial the technology and explore options to enhance the convenience and ease of parking in public parking structures.

The public parking garage, which opened last December, is the City’s first public garage outside of the central downtown and campus area, and was part of the three-development project that included the Spark Building where StartingBlock and American Family Insurance are located and the Gebhardt Building with the Sylvee music venue. Madison Gas and Electric, to support the redevelopment project and growing Capitol East District, sold the property to the City of Madison to construct the public parking garage.

ABOUT

StartingBlock Madison is Madison’s startup hub. Our mission is to create the meaningful intersections that cultivate entrepreneurs, grow successful companies, drive innovation and build a startup community that gives back. Since opening in June 2018, StartingBlock has housed 50 local startups that raised over $15.5M in 2018 and support over 160 full-time employees. Through collaborations with existing business leaders and partner organizations, such as Capital Entrepreneurs, Doyenne Group, gener8tor, and others, StartingBlock is helping galvanize Madison into a global leader in entrepreneurship.

ParqEx is a smart parking platform for real estate owners and managers to better manage & monetize their parking assets. By improving efficiency & utilization, the platform delivers value by reducing operating costs and generating new revenue. ParqEx is a gener8tor company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois and operates in 9 cities including Madison and Milwaukee, WI.

S. Livingston Garage opened in December 2018. The first public parking garage east of the Capitol Square, the S. Livingston ramp reflects Madison’s commitment to the growing Capitol East corridor.

Source: Fundera

The location of your startup could have a big impact on its growth and eventual success. The interest of investors in your startup, the availability of talent in the local labor pool, and an area’s cost of living can all work in a company’s favor or against it. 

Startup culture is centered in a few regions in the United States. The Silicon Valley Bay Area accounts for 45% of total venture capital investment in the U.S. When you add in other startup hubs, such as New York, Boston, and Seattle, it covers nearly three-quarters of the country’s venture capital investment. Many experts have called out so-called “second tier” startup cities, such as Portland and Austin, but even those regions are now becoming costly and saturated for would-be entrepreneurs.

In order to discover the best untapped cities for startups, Fundera gathered data on 50 mid-sized cities with a population under 500,000 residents. We measured each city’s access to a talented labor pool, average labor cost, office space cost, average cost of living, and proximity to a larger startup ecosystem. Our findings indicate that cities with high potential for startup success exist across the country. 

Here are some of our key takeaways:

• The top three cities—Madison, Plano, and St. Paul—earned high points for a combination of access to a well educated local labor pool and a relatively modest cost of doing business.
• A city with excellent feeder universities was likely to have a well-educated population and thus rank highly. Durham, St. Paul, and Madison all boast great nearby universities and an above-average concentration of residents with bachelor’s degrees.
• A city with low office space rental rates was also more likely to rank highly, though some cities like Plano with higher rates still ranked well due to steady or slow annual growth in the cost of office space.
• Several cities that are close to startup hubs, like Oakland with its proximity to San Francisco, didn’t make the top 11 because these are already too expensive.
• Smaller cities in California—including Bakersfield and Chula Vista—were weighed down by a lower percentage of educated workers, and thus ranked toward the bottom.

Read on to see the complete ranking of the best untapped cities for startups. This information is useful for prospective and current founders, investors, and startups that are considering multiple locations. 

The 11 Best Untapped Cities for Startups in 2020

Most startup businesses, whether the founders intend to raise venture capital or not, typically start out on a shoestring budget. As a result, the magic recipe for a startup-friendly city is one that has access to a relatively inexpensive, but high quality, talent pool from which to recruit workers. 

At the same time, the cost for the founding team to live in the city and rent office space there should also be reasonably affordable. Although the number of venture capital deals in a region was only a small factor in our analysis, venture capitalists like to invest locally, and a critical mass of startups that already exist in an area can be a positive pull-factor for investors and other startups. 

Accounting for all of these variables, the following 11 cities are the best untapped startup destinations:

1. Madison, WI

The beautiful city of Madison, Wisconsin is number one on our list, due to an excellent balance of startup-friendly factors. Madison boasts a well-educated population, with 57% having a bachelor’s degree or higher. This city also has the highest concentration of millennials compared to any other city in the country, making it a particularly great option for young startup founders and their teams. 

A young, well-educated talent pool is coupled here with low office rental prices that are falling year-over-year. The cost of living isn’t outrageously high with a $12.44 living wage cost, and the average median income of $64,101 is just a hair above the nationwide average. At just 73 VC deals over the last three years, Madison may best represent what it means for a city to be untapped. The startup scene here is small, but there is potential for immense growth.

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A discussion about beltline conditions accompanies just about any drive around the City of Madison. You might even check the popular Madison traffic twitter account when deciding, “which way around the lake?” It’s also no secret the beltline often determines whether you arrive at your meeting 15 minutes early or 20 minutes late.

The beltline carries more people than any other roadway combination in Dane County and its traffic volume has increased by more than 10 times since its initial construction in 1956. Motorist travel times are currently uncertain through weekday peak periods due to recurring congestion and roadway conditions continue to deteriorate.

Some modifications proposed by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) would offer improvements in the short-term as we await future beltline redevelopment. In addition to pavement resurfacing, median barrier and drainage modifications, an option known as dynamic part-time shoulder use could be incorporated.

During the busiest hours, dynamic part-time shoulder use presents a cost-effective, interim solution to address recurring congestion and increase travel time reliability. In addition, WisDOT’s analysis predicts the number of crashes will not increase with the part-time shoulder option, compared to the no-build condition.

“It might be another fifteen years before we see a complete and desperately-needed reconstruction of the beltline,” said Paul Jadin, President & CEO of the Madison Region Economic Partnership. “That, and the extraordinary population and business growth in the region, are why the MadREP Board of Directors supports the Dynamic Part-Time Shoulder initiative.”

Learn more about the Madison Dynamic Part-Time Shoulder Use project at the project webpage. If you have any additional questions, feel free to contact the project supervisor Brandon Lamers at Brandon.Lamers@dot.wi.gov.