Westfield board approves RadCube agreement to build city transparency portal

The Westfield Board of Public Works voted May 27 to approve a master services agreement with RadCube to build a city-hosted public transparency portal.

Christopher Larson, the city’s director of informatics, told the board the portal will begin with data tables for public safety and public works and will be hosted in the city’s cloud environment. Larson said the portal will use RadCube’s software and AI tooling to present dashboards and promised a process to add more data and dashboards over time.

Mayor Willis framed the project as a campaign promise and an accountability tool: "create a dashboard of information that matter to residents ... to give them transparency in everything we're doing in the city, good and bad," he said during the meeting. Staff said the portal components will run inside the Microsoft government cloud, which they said meets CIS compliance, and that the AI components will process only city-provided data within that environment.

Board members asked whether financial data could be added; staff replied financial reporting already exists via monthly clerk reports and that adding a direct feed to core financial systems would require additional governance and processes to ensure accuracy before publication.

The agreement was moved, seconded and approved by the board. Staff said work will begin on public safety and public works dashboards and that additional data sets will be considered once data-governance procedures are established.

What happens next: staff will implement the RadCube integration for the initial data tables and return with updates as dashboards are launched and additional data is considered for publication.