BNIA with Kevin McCarthy & Jamie Mathy

On episode #36 of Building BN, Patrick Hoban speaks with local elected officials Kevin McCarthy and Jamie Mathy about their new initiative — the Bloomington-Normal Innovation Alliance. 

McCarthy, who has been a Town of Normal Council Member since 2012, came to Bloomington-Normal in 1996 to attend ISU. He left after completing his undergraduate degree, returning later to attend graduate school, again at ISU — and, despite plans to move away again after his master's program, he stayed in Bloomington-Normal. Twenty-five years later, he says he finds himself “on the Normal Town Council, starting things with a counterpart, troublemaker from Bloomington.” McCarthy, who has completed over three hundred triathlons, is the Owner and President of PATH Performance Coaching and Consulting as well as a volunteer diving coach at IWU.

Mathy has been a Bloomington City Council Member since 2013. Like McCarthy, Mathy came to Bloomington-Normal to attend ISU. After leaving school to complete a 5-year stint in the Illinois National Guard, Mathy eventually returned to Bloomington-Normal, earning his associates degree from Heartland Community College. He then returned to ISU, studying Business Information Systems. Mathy is the Owner of Red Racoon Games, a retail store in downtown Bloomington.

The Bloomington-Normal Innovation Alliance, which includes the City of Bloomington, Town of Normal, McLean County Regional Planning Commission, Central Illinois Regional Broadband Network, Illinois State University, Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington-Normal Economic Development Council, and McLean County Chamber of Commerce, aims to build a brighter future for Bloomington-Normal. 

The BNIA’s purpose, from a recent presentation, is to “build a framework for collaboration” within the Bloomington-Normal community. Their stated vision, from the same March 11 presentation hosted by the McLean County Museum of History through their Lunch and Learn Series, focuses on the core reasons why such an alliance is so important for the community:

 “We see Mclean County as a vital participant in the digital economy, aligning industry, education, and government to embed technological innovation to help build a civil society that enables everyone to succeed in a world driven by technology. We invest in developing people, culture, and systems that eliminate digital divides and create seamless end-to-end interactions that create social value.”

McCarthy explains that the pandemic really highlighted the importance of local technology infrastructure. He explains, “All of a sudden last year [because of the pandemic] we saw how important it was to have people's houses connected with high speed for our kids and children. We had issues struggling to make sure that everybody could be connected and get access to the learning infrastructure. So we've got that aspect of it from an education and learning perspective. [Some areas] were having issues because they weren't ready for every student to be sitting home every day, working all of the time. A lot of businesses had the same issue, too. This defines where broadband went from an ‘optional nice to have’ to ‘broadband is important stuff’. The pandemic really put a spotlight on aspects of what the Innovation Alliance is meant to foster and spark.”

In addition to ensuring access to things like broadband internet remains reliable to the community, the Alliance also aims to benefit from the impact of the two communities working together. McCarthy explains, “Individually, we're all relatively small players here. But, together we can have a much larger collective impact when we're talking about technical infrastructure. Most people don't realize we're sitting on an information pipeline here in Bloomington-Normal that rivals the size of large cities. Certainly, one of the promises of the Innovation Alliance is collaboration…  and so is efficiency and operations, cost containment, and sustainability of government operations… [The community’s] ability to attract, retain and develop talent is the future of our ability to grow business here. Companies can grow here because of the digitization of what we're doing, the pipeline access to the larger world, and our ability to have that talent and help it grow.” 

Mathy explains that standardizing a collaborative approach to technology within the Bloomington-Normal community will also be a huge benefit. Using the implementation of police body cameras as an example, he highlights the consequences that arose when the town and city chose two completely different systems. Mathy says, “Both Normal and Bloomington started looking at body cams because that was the topic at the time and we ended up on two completely different bodycam systems. And if we had been on the same system, that would have saved everybody a lot of heartache and pain if the testing had happened together, as opposed to two separate units testing things, because two separate units cause issues for the state's attorney's office, who has to deal with Normal sending one set of data, Bloomington sending in a different set of data, in cases where [consistency] matters. This is a more recent example of where if we had had this alliance in place, we could have said, let's work on this together. Let's get our teams together and do this. And had a better result overall.”

Both McCarthy and Mathy stress the overall importance of taking a proactive approach to technology. McCarthy outlines questions he believes the Alliance should be focusing on, any time that an infrastructure project is planned within the community. He says, “Any time we can leverage a group that's looking at [a potential project] how do we get out of reactive mode? What's the opportunity here? How do we get in proactive mode if we're going to be digging up some roadway, if we're going to be knocking down these signals and putting something different or reprogramming or giving them different guts? What else can we do while we're up to it? How efficient can we be? What's Rivian up to? What's our broadband access need?” Essentially, he explains, the conversation is about viewing “infrastructure as economic development.” McCarthy then sums up the importance of a project like the BNIA. He says, “Because we can get companies to come here based on community invested infrastructure [which] we tend to think about [as] roads and bridges, which is true. But tech, as far as infrastructure, is just as important. A project like this, the Innovation Alliance, is really good because we've got the community players all at the same table and we can all have a good common conversation about the direction and what we need and what needs to be in place and when and all of those types of things so that we aren’t caught flat-footed going, [thinking] why didn't we get ready for this [fill in the blank] need, while watching the world go by.”

For more information regarding the Bloomington-Normal Innovation Alliance, you can email Jamie Mathy by phone at 309-828-9196. Kevin McCarthy can be reached by email kmccarthy@normal.org or by phone 309-451-9927. Listen to episode #36 of Building BN in its entirety, here.