97 Planning and Designing Better Communities year 2022 budget, including $54 million dedicated to road construction and a 3 percent increase for water fees. “We’re trying to tell the budget story in a way that folks can understand and relate to.” —Jay Warren, Director of Communications and Legislative Affairs, City of Arlington, Texas Hundreds of thousands of people watched the film and it was featured on the Today Show. It’s the same storytelling spirit the city has embraced in making other facts and figures more accessible to residents. That includes using GIS technology to better communicate key performance indicators (KPIs) to the public. KPIs include the tons of litter cleaned up, the number of visitors to the library, and the percent of building inspections conducted within 24 hours. The metrics are not presented as a list on a spreadsheet, but rather as eye-catching visuals showing whether there’s been improvement. Using a Scorecard to Tell the City’s Story Governments, like other institutions and businesses, keep score to focus on what matters most and to assure investors (in this case, tax-paying residents) that they’re getting a good return. In Arlington, a scorecard of KPIs is a municipal mainstay. Each department catalogs their quarterly metrics for elected officials, highlighting what’s working and what isn’t. It’s essentially the business plan for the annual budget. And much like the annual budget, it’s not easy to read. “It is written in such a way that I think you would be hard-pressed to find anyone in our community who could understand it. It’s just not user-friendly,” Warren said. The view allows anyone to learn more about the people living in individual census tracts based on the most recent census data, including age, gender, race, education, housing occupancy, poverty levels, and commute times to get to work. When Warren decided to make the quarterly scorecard reports for Arlington more palatable to the public, he turned to the city’s IT department to harness the storytelling capabilities of GIS. He wanted an online site to illustrate city council priorities: championing its neighborhoods, supporting Arlington youth and families, investing in the city’s economy, enhancing regional mobility, leveraging technology, and building unity. The IT department created the site called “Your City at Work”, building in functionality to quickly convey goals, metrics, and progress and automate the collection of KPIs. The site was created with ArcGIS Hub. “By and large, it’s a self-sufficient program,” said Ravi Devulapalli, applications specialist with Arlington’s IT department. Five years later, the dashboards are essentially running on autopilot. The latest figures are updated by individual departments. Dashboards are added when the city council outlines new goals, including the Clean Arlington program.
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