Gilbert has launched some "performance management" dashboards on its website that are meant to present data in an easy-to-digest way. This page from the police department shows mental health calls for service data.
Gilbert is publishing new "performance management" dashboards on its website, a move meant to provide transparency in government and provide residents a glimpse into town operations.
While performance management may have the ring of a human resources review tool, for Gilbert it is meant to give insights into the town's performance and areas of focus. That is meant both for residents and for decision-makers, who can decide if there is a business case for additional resources to meet town service goals.
The town unveiled on Wednesday afternoon its dashboards for the public works and police departments, which present graphics of real-time data on topics like infrastructure maintenance and crime rates. The dashboards can be found by searching for "performance management" on the town's website at www.gilbertaz.gov.
The goal is to roll out the remaining departments over time with all of the town's departments represented by September 2024. Next up are development services, economic development, and management and budget, with an anticipated online launch in December, according to Nikki McCarty, Gilbert's chief performance officer.
"You'll start seeing more dashboards sprinkled in and then we'll start with fire and parks and rec and our people team in January, and they'll just continue to evolve and grow," McCarty said.
City of the Future
The dashboards are part of Gilbert's "City of the Future" initiative, which aims to maintain the quality of life in town after build-out, projected in the early 2030s, and after the population peaks and begins to age.
The concern is that when that happens, the town will be in need of a large reinvestment in its infrastructure. About half the town's infrastructure was put in place between 1995 and 2005 when the town's population exploded, Town Manager Patrick Banger said.
With life cycles on roads and pipes often being about 40 years , the town likely will need to go to residents to ask for that reinvestment, but it would be coming at a time when there are fewer residents and they are older, likely needing to manage their own finances more carefully, Banger said.
"That's what happens with a lot of American cities from what we could see, and they don't make the right decisions," he said. "They start deferring maintenance, and things start to just deteriorate. And instead of buckling down and fixing it, we just move. We sell our home, and we move. We create these throwaway cities instead of reinvesting and fixing the problem."
City of the Future is meant to look at the dynamics of what is driving the decline and why cities cannot bounce back. To date, Gilbert has managed economic stress well — the Wall Street Journal rated Gilbert No. 1 among the 100 largest cities in America for municipal performance after the Great Recession — but Banger said the town cannot be too comfortable with that.
"One of the things that we try to remind ourselves is that you can begin to believe that you're just smarter than everybody else," he said. "You make better decisions than everybody else, but is that really true?
"Are there tough questions we should be asking ourselves that we're not asking ourself? And are we just at a moment in time where we have all this growth and investment and new infrastructure and new schools and new neighborhoods that it's more of a snapshot of where we are at at a moment in time as much it is good decision-making."
That is where the dashboards come in. The town got support from a group out of Johns Hopkins University that helps municipalities put programs like this in place.
"This was really our time to understand how do we really, as Patrick said, double down on this and really make this official and add that extra layer of actually monitoring our progress toward these goals," McCarty said. "Because City of Future is a big goal, and we talk a lot about what does that look like and how do we know we're achieving it."
Creating the dashboards
McCarty, who worked as a planner in the town and later as an assistant to Banger, was put into the role of chief performance officer in January 2022 to create the metrics program. She assembled a team with people embedded throughout the organization and got a lot of support from the Information Technology Department to make the dashboards work.
The work stressed the town as an organization, Banger said.
"We have so many disparate systems that put data out in so many different forms, and we need this to all be automated so it don't waste a lot of time with manual input where you'll get error, added expense," he said. "It's an incredible amount of work,"
The Public Works Department was the original "guinea pig." Later the Gilbert Police Department was added to the pilot program.
"We learned a lot," McCarty said. "And we've spent the last couple of months digesting what we learned, putting in place new processes."
One of the key decisions — and hardest — was which data points were to be represented. Banger said the town didn't want to overwhelm residents but keep it to things they really care about.
"We have hundreds of thousands of points of data on literally every single line of service that we do," Public Works Director Jessica Marlow said. "And so (we were) documenting and cataloging all of that and then kind of deciding which ones are the ones that we wanted to share."
In the end, Public Works created dashboards for solid waste and recycling missed pickups, container repairs, graffiti removal, pothole repairs, sewer pipe cleaning and video monitoring and inspections of sewer pipes.
Each one has a goal with it, and the dashboards are color coded to show if the town is meeting the goal, approaching the goal or if an area needs improvement. It also has a color for where targets are not yet set and staff is collecting data.
Those missed goals are important. Marlow said the town has aggressive goals on removing graffiti and repairing potholes. On the latter, the goal has been to repair 100% of potholes within 24 hours of them being reported. But that goal was not being met.
By digging into their data a little deeper, staff discovered flaws in the way requests were being processed, Marlow said. An adjustment has helped the town meet the goal in August and early thus far in September.
The police dashboards include data on "Part 1 crimes" as defined the FBI, which include some of the most serious crimes like murder, rape and aggravated assault; mental health calls for service; digital forensics unit use; domestic violence cases; criminal investigation cases; the volunteer program; and teleservice activity.
The real-time nature of the dashboard can help the department best deploy its resources, Assistant Chief Jim Bisceglie said. He used a vehicle burglary ring coming into town as a hypothetical.
"Well, that may happen in the middle of the night," Bisceglie said. "By the time the pass-on information gets along, it may kind of get out of hand. But if we are actively monitoring this, we could see, 'hey, what's going on here?' And then we could deploy our resources better to get ahead of some of those things."
McCarty called Wednesday a soft launch. She said the town can continue to make adjustments to meet what residents want to see.
"This will always continuously improve," she said. "There's not an end date to this program, end date to these dashboards. We are going to learn more from the community what they want to see or what they have questions on. And so we're approaching this as 'this is here, this is what we're working on.' We want the community to know, but there's going to be a lot more."
Tom Blodgett can be reached by email at tblodgett@iniusa.org or follow him @sp_blodgett on X. We would like to invite our readers to submit their civil comments, pro or con, on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org.
Meet Tom Tom Blodgett joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2022, when the company acquired Community Impact Newspaper's Phoenix-area properties. Raised in Arizona, he has spent more than 35 years in journalism in the state.
Community: He has served as an instructional professional in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 2005, and is editorial adviser to The State Press, the university's independent student media outlet. He also is director of operations for an 18U girls fastpitch softball team from Gilbert.
Education: Arizona State University with a BS in Journalism.
Random Fact: He lived in Belgium during his freshman year of high school.
Hobbies: Tweeting enthusiastically about ASU softball (season-ticket holder) and grumpily about other local sports (pessimistic fan).
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