The Syracuse Surge: A Prospective City Plan for Tech and Economic Development
In January, Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh outlined a $200 million plan for the Syracuse Surge, a massive undertaking in expanding the city’s access to technology through new jobs, learning opportunities, and general improvements to city infrastructure. The project is both publicly and privately funded, with strong pledges of financial support from Empire State Development, Onondaga County, and Governor Andrew Cuomo. Surge plan details range from building a remotely controlled network out of the 17,507 LED lights recently bought by the city to create better outdoor lighting with brightening and dimming options, to establishing a new high school centered around STEM and art which would be accessible to students county-wide. The public lighting highlights another innovation which is the lightings’ capabilities of data collection through its network which will be amassed and analyzed by another inventive project yet to be realized- the New York Center for Smart Cities, a data hub meant to eventually become the city’s command center.
Syracuse is not planning on building the surge from the bottom up, as certain tech enterprises have already begun moving to upstate New York, companies such as Saab Sensis Corp. and the Northeast UAS Airspace Integration Research Alliance, incentivizing certain industry workers who would have moved away to stay upstate because of the jobs available in the field. Although Syracuse’s population experienced a decline in the thousands between 2010 and 2017, officials are hopeful that the tech surge will keep people in Syracuse and foster a new generation of technologically minded people who will expand the city’s population and job market.
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