Born out of the Outcome Budgeting process, the City of Baltimore’s Innovation Fund started in Fiscal 2012. The purpose of the fund is to provide seed money for one-time investments that will lead to improved results, increased revenue, and/or reduced ongoing operating costs for City services.
The Innovation Fund is meant to be self-sustaining; savings from the investments are returned to the Fund so that other projects may be funded. Continuing this Fund is one way to keep City agency heads and staff focused on innovation and spur creative solutions on how to use our limited resources.
Funds are awarded through a competitive process among City agencies. Descriptions of the first two Innovation Fund projects are below.
Environmental Health, Baltimore City Health Department
This project will modernize Environmental Health (EH) services in Baltimore City by transitioning from entirely paper-based enterprise to an automated, paperless business process, or web-based quality management system. Modernizing EH’s business process will result in a decrease of $78,000 in annual operating costs, and a projected $800,000 in increased license renewal and citation revenue over the next five years.
E-Plans Review, Department of Housing and Community Development
This project will modernize the (development) Plans Review process, taking it from the current paper system to an all-electronic review process. Transitioning to e-Plans will decrease turnaround time to complete plans review by at least 20% on all projects; increase customer-satisfaction because developers will no longer have to print costly plans to submit on paper for review; and decrease annual operating costs by $54,000.