Frank Martz is the City Manager of Altamonte Springs, Florida. Under his leadership, the city has become recognized internationally as a model of municipal innovation while maintaining one of the lowest tax rates in Florida, among the lowest utility rates in the region, and operating debt-free for more than thirteen years.
Martz has redefined what innovation means at the city level. Altamonte Springs has earned national recognition for delivering world-class services at low cost while preparing the community to remain stable, sustainable, and economically competitive. These efforts helped the city earn placement as one of only three Florida cities in Money Magazine’s Top 50 U.S. cities to live and as the ninth-best city in the nation for small business by WalletHub.
A hallmark of his tenure is his ability to build meaningful public-private partnerships. He led the creation of one of the first demand-response transportation algorithms in the United States, funded by state and federal partners. He then partnered with Uber on its first community-wide mobility program, later expanded to multiple cities and replicated globally in more than 70 communities across four continents. More recently, he partnered with FDOT and Beep Mobility to launch CraneRIDES, the first mixed-traffic autonomous vehicle service in Florida and the nation’s first permanent AV deployment by a city.
Martz has placed equal emphasis on education and workforce development. He founded the Altamonte Springs Science Incubator (AS2I), the first city-led STEM education program in Florida, in partnership with Seminole County Public Schools, Duke Energy, and AdventHealth. Over the past decade, more than 35,000 students have participated, and dozens of scholarships have been awarded through civic and philanthropic partnerships.
His leadership has also produced groundbreaking environmental projects. The city’s pureALTA system—developed under his direction—creates drinking water from reuse water without reverse osmosis, winning an international innovation award against competitors from 45 countries. He also created the Altamonte Electric Utility, which built one of the nation’s first floating solar installations, generating one megawatt of electricity and supplying up to 70% of the city’s regional utility plant with solar power.
Altamonte Springs was also the first U.S. city to adopt AI-powered site plan review in partnership with AutoReview.AI. Around such platforms, Martz has built internship and workforce development initiatives in law, finance, insurance, and banking with private-sector partners. The city is preparing to host a second U.S. pilot of hydrothermal processing, a technology that converts solid waste into biocrude and biogas in minutes rather than millennia, and a pilot to determine if hydrothermal processing can remove PFAS’s from groundwater.
To scale this innovation agenda, Martz launched the Altamonte Global Innovation Lab (AGīL), a testbed where public and private partners pilot solutions in mobility, environment, and data-driven governance. AGīL now includes county-wide government participation and growing national and international partnerships, with the aim of lowering taxpayer costs through joint procurement while expanding economic opportunity.
His leadership is recognized well beyond the city. The Orlando Business Journal named him one of Central Florida’s most influential leaders. Frank is a board member of the ACES Mobility Coalition. He chairs Congressional District 7’s Transportation Advisory Committee and participates in international networks including Cities Today Institute and Harvard’s Technology & Entrepreneurial Center. He was a Global Founding Member of MasterCard’s City Possible program and a speaker at NASA’s PowerSource Global Summit. He was named one of the Top 10 Public Sector Transportation Innovators in the United States by the Eno Center for Transportation, and his initiatives are featured in City Tech: 20 Apps, Ideas, and Innovators Changing the Urban Landscape, published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.