JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Mayor Donna Deegan unrolled the first round of the city’s new ‘transparency dashboards’ Tuesday, calling them an opportunity for residents to engage with local government.
The available dashboards currently cover information from Animal Care and Protective Services, permitting, public works and Deegan’s River City Readers program. Deegan encouraged residents to give the administration feedback on what else they would like to see.
“These truly are not an attempt to make us look good,” Deegan said. “Things are as they are right now. So we are working very hard to make sure that as, hopefully, we continue to meet the goals of this administration, we're able to show that. But in the meantime, we want you to see in real time what's happening.”
The dashboards do not provide access to all department information but provide updates on major projects. The board dedicated to permitting, for example, breaks down how many permits have been given in the past year to various types of residential permits. The public works dashboard reports how many miles of road have been resurfaced and how many acres of grass has been mowed.
The River City Readers data shows the overall number of readers, how many are in each age group, their participating library and their average minutes read. The city's animal services dashboard provides some of the most detailed data, including the number of animals taken in, volunteer hours over the past year, the number of animals adopted and the number of animals saved.
The data is currently updated daily, or as often as available, Chief Information Officer Wanyonyi Kendrick said.
The city will add capital improvement project dashboards in the coming months in two phases, Kendrick said. The boards will first focus on the progress of downtown projects specifically and eventually expand to cover city-wide projects broken down by council district.
The boards come after Deegan has unveiled major changes to the city’s website and added JaxEPICS, a platform for developers and homeowners to more conveniently follow the city’s permitting process.
Deegan encouraged residents to engage with the dashboards and communicate what other information they would like to be displayed on the city’s website.
“I think it's important, not only in getting people to be interactive with their own government, which was one of the goals of this administration, is to bring people inside City Hall,” Deegan said. “People feel empowered, that they know information that they can connect with that information, then they're going to be more likely to engage with their city government, and we really, really want that.”