Population growth of 33% over a decade with only one city employee added to the payroll is one of the accomplishments cited by former Fort Wayne mayor, Graham Richard, in his keynote talk at the 2010 Broadband Properties Summit. Richard pointed out that cities face an $83 billion shortfall in the next couple of years and improving efficiency (doing more with the same number of employees) in government is going to be a critical way to make the proverbial ends meet.

Broadband was a key catalyst to Fort Wayne’s efficiency improvement. He said it is critical to have a collaborative effort between government and business and, thanks to their joint efforts, they were successful in convincing Verizon to deploy Fios in Fort Wayne (Verizon’s only Midwestern deployment of Fios). Early in his administration, he convened various stakeholders from local businesses, anchor institutions and government and they came up with a plan to use broadband to make Fort Wayne more efficient. Richard explained that a big part of improving efficiency was making data driven decisions.

Broadband, both wireless or wired, along with associated devices and sensors, allows the low-cost gathering of data of some pretty mundane, but important information. For instance, the city of Fort Wayne was able to eliminate the purchase of a street sweeper by more efficiently rerouting their existing sweeper. They were able to take this action thanks to sensors they added to the street sweeper that indicated where and when the brushes were being deployed in the street sweeper’s route.

Beyond efficiency, the city of Fort Wayne and its citizens have seen improvements in public safety (think more patrols and less paper work for police officers), quality jobs to the area that require broadband and improved health care. To this last point, the installation of a broadband retinal scanner at a private, non-profit clinic, which connects to doctors across town, allows the diagnosis of disease for people who otherwise would not have access to that level of health care.

Richard is taking his message across the country and is consulting with various entities to share Fort Wayne’s success with the larger national community. Watch the video above to hear some of Richard’s wisdom regarding broadband deployment.