After seven months of weekly meetings by the team putting it together, and even more meetings for sub-committees and working groups, the i's are being dotted and the t's are being crossed on the City of Airdrie's Smart Cities Application that could win $10 million from the federal government.  

Intergovernmental Affairs Liaison for Airdrie Leona Esau is part of the team that consists of seven City of Airdrie staff and four from the Airdrie and Area Health Benefits Cooperative.  The deadline that the application must be submitted by is 11:59 pm on Tuesday, March 5th.  Esau says the proposal is written and has a video that goes with it and is now in the final stages of finishing the design detail work to polish it up.

Airdrie was named one of the 10 finalists in the $10 million category in the Smart Cities Challenge by Infrastructure Canada last June.  The city was one of 120 municipalities to put in a proposal.  There will be two winners named, giving Airdrie a one in five chance of a $10 million prize.

The Airdrie Smart Cities entry is based on becoming the healthiest city in Canada and owning our health with a vision to: "Own our own health information, enabling efforts to be Canada's healthiest community, individually and collectively."  

Esau says they've gone through an extensive review of the text of the document to make sure that nothing has been left out.  "We just signed off on our video which we will release as soon as the federal government loads it to their website, we'll load it to our website, healthsmartairdrie.ca at the same time.," she says.  "We just can't do any of that prior to them putting it up on their own website so it will probably be Wednesday or Thursday (March 6 or 7) that we'll be able to reveal everything to our public here in Airdrie."

Once the application is submitted, Esau thinks the government will make its decision within about three months.

"Federal government exports will be given the opportunity to review it as well as a private accounting firm that the federal government has hired to review all of the applications and provide a detailed evaluation back to the 13 jury members, of how well each proposal actually meets the criteria that was outlined by the federal government.  We should receive questions by the end of April and we'll have about a week to respond to those questions from the jury in writing.

Sometime in May we will all be called to a central location to meet with all the other finalists and go through what we learned and how could you make this better for the second Smart Cities Challenge.  I believe we're going to be able to do a presentation then the winner will be announced shortly after that.  We should know by late spring who has been awarded the $10 million."

Esau encourages people to get a jump on their health even before we find out if we've won $10 million.  "Visit healthsmartairdrie.ca and find out about the eight determinants that significantly impact our health.  This goes well beyond just exercise and the food that we eat.  I'd encourage people to just find out more and take that small step to start owning their own health here in Airdrie."

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