Charleston, South Carolina, USA

Creating a One-Stop-Shop to Track Progress on City Goals.

Project Type:
Community Engagement, Environment, Equity, Housing, Infrastructure, Public Safety, Technology

At a Glance

Charleston’s TIDEeye app helps the city and its residents monitor the effects of severe weather by providing real-time data on road closures and weather information.

Charleston has added almost 800 affordable housing units since 2016, and 500 more currently in the pipeline.

Data has shown that 86% of the affordable housing units in development are within .5 miles of public transit.

Known as a tourist destination with idyllic horse-drawn carriages, the City optimized equine waste management with GPS tracking. The system helped reduce cleanup time from 40 minutes to 20 minutes.

Using outcomes-based performance management practices to understand if programs are achieving their intended impact.

For cities with competing priorities and limited resources, making city-wide strategic goals built on data and evidence is an achievement in itself. But tracking progress, engaging residents and strengthening accountability is a tougher feat.

In 2022, the City of Charleston outlined six mayoral priorities and launched PriorityStat, an online dashboard and public meeting series to increase transparency and help the City and residents track progress on these six goals. While traditional city open data dashboards are organized around departments or services, PriorityStat takes a more innovative approach and is centered on City—and residents’—priorities.

For instance, FloodStat, one of the dashboards, is focused on protecting the City from sea level rise and flooding. In the 1950s, Charleston was impacted two days per year on average by nuisance flooding. In the past five years, that average is now 61 days per year. Traditional dashboards would have relevant metrics, such as police complaints about flooded roads and properties, and city carbon emissions, in different dashboards since they’re in different departments. But addressing flooding and coastal challenges requires many departments to effectively work together. FloodStat helps break down silos by developing and regularly tracking metrics that require cross-agency collaboration. Additionally, it gives residents one place to see a more complete and clear picture of how the City is combatting its challenges.

Another one of the mayoral priorities is affordable housing. Home prices have jumped 78% since 2011 in Charleston—an unsurprising trend for a City with a 25% population increase since 2010 and more than 7 million visitors each year.

HousingStat allowed Charleston officials to develop a 10-year comprehensive plan to improve housing. To eliminate affordability gaps by 2030, the City learned that it needs more than 16,000 affordable units. HousingStat has also led to new programs, such as a Senior Homeowner Initiative, that has already helped 18 seniors become first-time homeowners. Regularly disaggregated data has helped the City allocate resources where they are needed most and develop more targeted strategies.

“We’ve been able to cut red tape on affordable housing initiatives. This is the largest, most ambitious affordable and workforce housing initiative in our city’s history.”

John Tecklenburg, Mayor

The City is clear that PriorityStat is still a work in progress. Two more dashboards are on the docket for 2024: one for mobility and transportation, and the other for neighborhood livability and resident quality of life. While these are being built, the City is actively seeking feedback and encouraging residents to watch public meetings on Charleston’s YouTube page.

PriorityStat is a performance management grand slam for the City. But more importantly it’s a win for residents. An unwieldy and unorganized performance management dashboard isn’t a platform that performs for residents. Charleston’s PriorityStat is different: by embedding accountability, transparency and collaboration into the fabric of the City’s strategic goals, residents know the City is making strides with them in mind.

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Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA

Tulsa Scales Up Data-First Innovation.

Project Type:
Communications, Cross-Sector, Economic Development, Education, Energy, Equity, Finance, Health & Wellness, High-Performing Government, Housing, Public Safety

At a Glance

Created a cross-departmental team that identifies the most effective methods for achieving the city’s top goals and leads the city’s data-driven transformation.

Found patterns in 911 repeat call data that signaled the need for a new referral program to deliver specialized healthcare and social services for residents. Within the first three months of launching the program, there was a 70% reduction in calls from its top 911 utilizers.

Partnered city agencies and civic tech nonprofits to develop a text reminder system that reduced missed fines and warrants that have helped the City’s Court see an annual 187,000 increase in revenue.

Using Data to Power Innovation

G.T. Bynum has leadership in his veins. One of the youngest people ever elected mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, he’s the fourth person in his extended family to serve in the role since the turn of the last century. But he is the city’s first mayor to place data-driven decision making at the top of a change agenda. Since becoming mayor in December 2016, his administration has marked a turning point in how Tulsa uses data to power innovation and improve the quality of life in Tulsa.

Mayor Bynum didn’t waste any time after being elected. The idea of improving city services and using data to make key decisions was at the core of his mayoral campaign. One of his first moves as Mayor was the creation of the Office of Performance Strategy and Innovation (OPSI). The office works to align the city’s top goals with effective strategies. It quickly became key to the city’s data-driven transformation, says James Wagner, who led OPSI at its inception and is now the city’s director of finance and CFO.

Ben Harris, OPSI’s Data Analytics Manager, convened a team of employees from 16 departments to lead the city’s data governance and strategic planning efforts. The Data Governance Committee, which sets the standard and strategy for data quality, integrity, and use for the city government, has helped integrate the use of data citywide through the creation of a Central Data Repository where any employee or resident can request data.

“Through this cross-departmental team, we encourage transparency, access to data, and a feedback loop; ultimately it creates a trust relationship between departments,” Harris said.

“In addition to teamwork, technology played a huge role in orchestrating communication, automating data movement, securing data, and making it accessible.”

Data Analytics Manager Ben Harris

OPSI and the Committee also facilitate regular sessions with department leaders to focus on the value of performance metrics. These meetings aren’t just about tracking progress reviewing data — they’ve created a new space within the city to cultivate innovation.

“Mayor Bynum and other city leaders have consistently looked to OPSI to drive data-driven innovation work in Tulsa. This matters because we’re making real changes that improve city services and save taxpayers money.”

Chief Financial Officer James Wagner

A Caring Fire Department

For years, the number of calls to the Tulsa Fire Department was increasing, putting stress on their resources and capacity. By analyzing the data, the fire department discovered the source of the increased calls was not an increase in fires, but instead an increasing aging population who needed lift assists. Lift assists are calls to the 911 system for a non-emergency fall — the help the resident is requesting is to literally be picked up off of the ground. The city discovered a repeat lift assist pattern, with some residents requesting a lift assist as many as nine times a day.

Under the direction of Chief Michael Baker, the Fire Department developed and launched the Tulsa Community Assistance Referral and Educational Services (CARES) program, which was designed to connect high-utilizers of the emergency system to healthcare and social service providers. Visits to the highest utilizers became proactive, with the CARES team working on simple fixes such as installing low-cost solutions like handrails and opening up a dialogue with the resident’s primary care doctor. Within the first three months of the pilot, the fire department saw a 70 percent reduction in calls from its top 911 utilizers.

With preliminary results in hand, Baker presented his findings through the TulStat forum.

“TulStat,” based on the successful “LouieStat” program out of Louisville, Kentucky, has created a forum for change in Tulsa. City leaders gather to discuss priority problems, define success, innovate solutions, and develop methods for measuring progress. They identify specific, quantifiable goals, such as average time for reviewing building permit applications (previously 5 weeks, now 92 percent completed in 5 days) or responding to a 911 call, and troubleshoot obstacles to achieving them.

While CARES was developed before Bynum’s administration founded TulStat, having a space to build off of the pilot’s success was critical in connecting more residents to much-needed services. The program has served 204 clients; in 2020, four Tulsans have “graduated” the program and have the needed support services in place for them to live safely in their homes.

In the future, CARES hopes to work with OPSI to expand their data capacity to learn how to predict who is at risk for becoming a repeat caller to the 911 system and intervening early to distribute tools and services. Aligning community resources to provide innovative, proactive care will not only save the city’s Medicare and Medicaid partners money, it could save a resident’s life.

Breaking the Cycle

Working with What Works Cities and the Behavioural Insights Team, OPSI also helped the Tulsa Municipal Court solve a problem that had burdened the court and vulnerable residents for years.

Previously, when the court issued a resident a fine in a criminal case, but that resident wasn’t able to pay that fine on time, the court would offer an extension in the form of a “Time to Pay Order.” Some found themselves with a fine due more than 12 months in the future — enough time for them to save money for the payment, but also plenty of time to forget when it was due. As of early 2018, more than 70 percent of those orders resulted in a failure-to-pay warrant. For many, a warrant can exacerbate the cycle of poverty: a driver’s license might be suspended and additional fines can accrue, pulling someone further into the criminal justice system.

To combat the problem, OPSI partnered with the Court and Code for Tulsa to figure out how to reduce the number of warrants issued. Within a month, a text message pilot project was underway, designed around a simple hypothesis: Many people missed their Time to Pay Order deadline because they forgot the due date or lost paperwork. Together, OPSI, the Court, and Code for Tulsa developed a system to text simple, personalized reminders to a randomly selected pool of Time to Pay Order recipients. The test group received a text message reminder once a month leading up to their deadline.

The results were remarkable. During the six-month pilot, 63 percent of those who received a reminder paid all of their outstanding fees, compared to 48 percent of residents who did not receive reminders. Armed with data showing this 15 percent point increase, the Court system adopted the new reminder system. It now estimates an additional 320 people are paying their fees on time each year, avoiding warrants and additional problems because of the system. The Court benefited as well, seeing an annual $187,000 increase in revenue and a morale boost among employees who helped implement the solution.

“I’ve never been so excited about a job,” said Jamie King, a cost administrator at the court.

At the City’s Core

OPSI’s successful partnerships with city departments go beyond the fire department and courts. Three years in, OPSI has implemented practices and programs that have positioned Tulsa as a leader in data and innovation. In 2017, the office launched Urban Data Pioneers, an award-winning program consisting of teams of residents and city employees who analyze data to help the city solve key challenges and present policy recommendations.

With OPSI’s clear-cut ability to drive innovation, Mayor Bynum decided to integrate the office into the city’s key funding decisions. When Wagner became Director of Finance and CFO in early 2019, he brought OPSI with him to the Finance Department. This has changed the way Tulsa funds innovation. In essence, a data-driven approach has been institutionalized and scaled. Today, the city bases funding on data that proves programs work. OPSI vets data.

“We had the opportunity to take the approach and plug it into the finance department,” Mayor Bynum said. “It helps make it have much more of a citywide cultural impact.”

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Syracuse, New York, USA

In Syracuse, Data Delivers Efficient, Effective and Equitable Services.

Project Type:
Equity, Finance, High-Performing Government, Housing, Infrastructure

2023 Gold Certification

Several years ago the City of Syracuse teamed up with the Syracuse Metropolitan Transportation Council (SMTC) to create a data-driven prioritization for road reconstruction. This year, the City and SMTC introduced an equity component to the priority scoring process to ensure that the City does not overlook roads in historically underserved neighborhoods. Inspired by equity score systems in other cities, the City created a metric to measure the amount of historically underserved residents in an area. The new model considers the equity score as well as road conditions when recommending reconstruction projects for the year. In this way, the City avoided completely reinventing the reconstruction priority process while introducing equity as an additional factor.

2021 Silver Certification

Compiled data from GPS units in each snowplow, allowing the city to create and publish an interactive map for residents to determine if a street was already plowed and allowing city staff to quickly identify any streets a snowplow may have missed on its run.

Created a database mapping sidewalks and walkways in 164 parks in order to improve its approach to snow removal, empowering the city to lower the average time to clear paths of snow from 3 days to 6 hours.

Gave city departments centralized access to budgeted and actual financial data, allowing staff to better predict funding needs and allocate resources. Analysis from this data saved the city an estimated $800,000 on salt used for de-icing.

Determined locations for new affordable housing construction by gathering and analyzing quantitative data on the locations of vacant properties and qualitative data from 800 resident interviews.

The Snowiest City

Syracuse, New York is seriously snowy. Averaging more than 120 inches of snowfall each year, it’s officially the country’s snowiest city. Throughout each long winter, staff in the Department of Public Works (DPW) work to keep roads and sidewalks clear and safe so residents can keep moving. Until a few years ago, Syracuse’s snow removal services were challenged, resources were limited, and many residents weren’t happy.

“I used to want to avoid Facebook every time we had a storm,” says Corey Dunham, the City’s chief operating officer. “There were just too many friends and family complaining about the snow on their streets!”

When Mayor Ben Walsh took office in 2018, he was determined to take a new data-driven approach to tackle persistent problems facing Syracuse residents. Whatever the problem in Syracuse today, a first step toward designing a solution is to dig into data. “You can’t fix what you don’t fully understand,” Mayor Walsh said in his 2019 State of the City address. Data helps the City understand the causes of problems and address them, he added.

With clear support from the Mayor’s Office, city staff have worked in recent years to build foundational data practices including general management, performance & analytics, and open data to improve the delivery of city services like snow removal. The aim is to deliver efficient, effective, and equitable services — a goal that has become core to Walsh’s administration.

“We’re not data-driven for the sake of being data-driven. Data empowers us to know if we’re being effective or not, and then pivot when we need to change.”

Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh

Deputy Mayor Sharon Owens admits she was once a “data nonbeliever.” Now she has the passion of a convert. “Being able to use data to hone in on quality-of-life issues is crucial,” Owens says. “We spend too much time sending out a wide net when we should be honing in. Residents are impacted by our ability to take data and use it to solve the problems they care about.”

Plowing Through Data

The Parks Department and DPW’s effort to overhaul how they prioritize clearing snow from roads and sidewalks shows how data can translate into better and more transparent city services.

During snow events, the DPW snow plows move into action. The department follows a system of prioritizing city streets for snow removal: the first priority is always emergency routes, followed by hills around the city and roads with significantly higher levels of traffic. Flatter city streets generally found in residential neighborhoods come next.

Clearing the City’s streets after a snowfall. Image courtesy of the City of Syracuse.

The City compiled data from GPS units in each snowplow to create and publish an interactive map on the City website, enabling residents and property owners to track the path of snowplows during storms to determine if a street was already plowed. The map includes timestamps of a plow’s most recent pass of a street. The data also equipped the DPW staff to more quickly and accurately identify any streets a snowplow may have missed on its run.

To improve sidewalk snow clearance, the City took a similar approach. Working with the Syracuse Metropolitan Transportation Council, a team of DPW staff members and transportation planners first mapped foot traffic, building a dataset detailing which sidewalks are used most frequently and which are adjacent to the most dangerous streets. Again, data analysis showed the obvious snow removal strategy.

“We determined the most dangerous streets for pedestrians and cleared sidewalks in those areas first. Using data, we were able to make and defend decisions about why we chose to clear certain streets and sidewalks over others.”

Chief Operating Officer Corey Dunham

The Department of Parks, Recreation and Youth Programs also dug into data to improve its approach to snow removal. The first step was mapping all the sidewalks and walkways in Syracuse’s 164 parks it is responsible for — 13 miles total, the department learned. Previously it would take three days after a major snow event to clear all sidewalks and walkways. After creating a color-coded map making priority routes clear — and buying two Bobcat L28 machines enabling a sidewalk to be cleared in just one pass — the department now clears them in just six hours.

Syracuse officials have also used more data-driven budgeting practices to save money on road de-icing materials. Previously, each department across the city was managing its own financials and budgeting from budget-to-budget, instead of actuals-to-budget. By centralizing the budget planning process and providing actuals to departments, Syracuse was able to make better spending decisions. This approach allowed DPW to analyze data for how much salt it purchased each year for de-icing and how much salt it actually used. The ultimate outcome: officials were able to better predict how much salt they needed to buy. Last year, the data-driven effort helped the city save an estimated $800,000 on salt purchases.

More Results to Come

Syracuse’s efforts to strengthen its data culture and practices have yielded benefits beyond snow removal. The City has also used data-driven problem-solving skills to address more complex challenges, such as poverty, inequities highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and neighborhood revitalization efforts.

Looking ahead, exciting things are in the works — all fueled by the data capacity Syracuse has built. Later this month, the City plans on unveiling a brand-new resident information system revamping its city service request system into a more comprehensive and user-friendly portal.

And by the end of the year, Syracuse will build the first 25 of 200 one- and two-family housing units through the new Resurgent Neighborhood Initiative (RNI). The program supports city neighborhood planning and revitalization at the block level. Affordable housing construction locations were chosen by analyzing quantitative data detailing the locations of vacant and unused properties, and gathering qualitative data through 800 resident interviews conducted over eight months. This stakeholder engagement helps ensure equity, so the City can better deliver on the promise of affordable housing.

“Whether the challenge is housing, a pandemic, or snow removal, being a data-driven city means efficiently, effectively, and equitably delivering services that taxpayers pay for,” Mayor Walsh says. “This is the nuts and bolts of local government.”

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Seattle, Washington, USA

Seattle: Transforming a City in Fast-Moving Transition.

Project Type:
Communications, Equity, Finance, Health & Wellness, High-Performing Government, Infrastructure

At a Glance

Initiated a data-driven approach to homelessness intervention that reoriented providers’ thinking — and their service delivery models — around the goal of ensuring any experience of homelessness in Seattle is rare, brief, and one-time.

Used a results-based contracting approach to monitor contract progress and encouraged contract managers and providers to meet regularly to review performance data.

Developed a dashboard focused on homelessness-related data from twelve departments to have better situational awareness of the homelessness crisis, in addition to how human services programs are performing.

Seattle is More than a Cup of Coffee

Fast-paced economic development is bringing plenty of high-tech jobs to Seattle and leading to spikes in household incomes, but progress isn’t being felt by everyone. It’s also contributing to a severe shortage of affordable housing and a homelessness crisis that led the City to declare a state of emergency in November 2015. This wasn’t for a lack of funding directed toward the city’s most vulnerable residents; Seattle’s budget for homeless services grew from $29 million in 2005 to $50 million in 2016 while homelessness continued to rise. Struggling to keep up, the City had to take a hard look at how it was tackling the crisis.

In response, the City launched its Pathways Home plan to shift its focus away from emergency, short-term interventions toward longer-term solutions, using data-driven decision-making to guide the way. As the City says, “Every dollar spent on emergency beds is a dollar not spent on strategies that allow people to exit homelessness.” A critical aspect of the plan was to rethink relationships with outside providers that contract with the City’s Human Services Department (HSD) to provide homelessness services, beginning with a pilot of $8.5 million worth of contracts. The pilot was carried out as part of Seattle’s engagement with What Works Cities partner the Government Performance Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School.

George, Maria, and their young son are among families that nonprofits contracted with the City have helped to move into permanent housing.

Through the pilot, providers were no longer tracking indicators like how many beds were filled or meals were distributed, but rather metrics such as how many people moved into permanent housing or became homeless again after being served, and how long they experienced homelessness. The approach reoriented providers’ thinking — and their service delivery models — around the goal of ensuring any experience of homelessness in Seattle is rare, brief, and one time. By using a results-based contracting approach, that’s what the City began holding providers accountable for too; contract managers and providers began meeting regularly to review performance data, enabling the City to troubleshoot problems in real time and spread the most effective practices.

“It’s not just about more money, although more resources is important. It’s also about thinking and how we do our work differently. How do we use data in a way that is not just compliance-driven, but helps us figure out what is working for people we’re trying to support out of crisis?”

Human Services Department Director Catherine Lester

Seattle has just expanded the pilot to $34 million in contracts awarded to bidders following the issuance of the City’s first competitive RFP for homelessness services in ten years. By keeping providers on target with performance benchmarks, the City aimed to double the number of people being moved into permanent housing by the end of 2018. Seattle is also expanding the performance-based model even further — across the entirety of HSD, which invests $105 million in contracts annually. Simultaneously, the City is developing a dashboard that will bring together homelessness-related data from twelve departments to have better situational awareness of the homelessness crisis, in addition to how human services programs are performing. Soon, real-time data will be available to staff, enabling a more coordinated, citywide approach to tackling the problem, tracking vendor performance, and more.

These efforts are part of a larger culture of data use throughout City Hall. Seattle was one of the first cities in the country to pursue open data and has a robust approach to engaging residents that goes beyond simply publishing data sets on its open data portal. The City is also advancing skills it developed with What Works Cities partner the Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University by rolling out performance management citywide. To help facilitate that process, the City’s Office of Performance is conducting twelve-week engagements with departments on a rolling basis to train staff. “Getting people the right resources — that’s what’s critical to getting the job done,” says former Organizational Performance Director Tyler Running Deer, who also worked extensively to help departments link their performance and budgeting goals. Seattle is also sharing progress toward citywide goals via its performance portal, one of several public-facing ways residents are kept informed.

After data showed that use of a former bikeshare program wasn’t offsetting its cost or meeting users’ needs, the City piloted a dockless model.

By tracking data and seeing what works, Seattle is learning important lessons about when and how to allocate funding, manage programs, or sometimes, when to shut them down. In one recent example, the City rolled out a bike share program, but data showed use wasn’t offsetting the cost and the service wasn’t meeting users’ needs. Bike docks were taking up valuable parking space, much to the dismay of local business owners. A highly-used station was located on a hilltop, so users weren’t returning the bikes, leaving the task to a truck that drove large numbers of bikes back to the dock at the end of each day. Now the City is piloting a dockless model with three different companies that are funding the program through their own revenue, and had to provide a data-collection plan before receiving permitting. Users can take the new bikes on the routes they truly travel and park them in more convenient locations. Without the temptation to concentrate docks in the highest-income areas, the hope is that bike access will also become more equitable. So far, the results seem promising, but for this city, there’s more than time that will tell — there’s also data.

Read more about Seattle’s data journey here.

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San Jose, California, USA

Harnessing Silicon Valley’s Genius in San Jose.

Project Type:
Community Engagement, Cross-Sector, Equity, Health & Wellness, High-Performing Government, Infrastructure, Technology

At a Glance

Implemented public-private partnerships to identify barriers to break down the digital divide and make internet access more equitable in one of the nation’s largest cross-sector digital inclusion efforts to date.

Set up grant-based contracts for local community-based organizations to help them deliver broadband to 50,000 unconnected households by the year 2030.

Launched an app for residents to both submit service requests and receive service information from the city, which fields 165,000 service requests a year.

The Silicon Valley

San José’s status as the capital of booming Silicon Valley is hard to miss. Construction cranes dot the skyline, powering the city’s steady downtown growth. Major tech companies like Zoom and Cisco call the city home, Google will soon open a huge new campus on 60 acres downtown, and giants like Apple and Facebook are headquartered in suburbs just to the west. With great pride in its diverse heritage, this is a city oriented toward the future, a stance reflected in San José City Hall. The postmodern structure’s glass-paneled rotunda confidently embraces the Valley’s nearly constant sunshine.

With five major roadways criss-crossing the city, a gleaming new BART line, and a major public transportation hub set to open in 2021, strengthening connections to Oakland and other East Bay locales, San José is poised to become a true hub of the Bay Area. The region’s tech talent and entrepreneurial spirit is alive in City Hall, with leaders and staff of all stripes having spent time in the local private sector. They bring big aspirations of impact to this diverse city of more than one million people, of whom 40 percent were born outside of the United States, and over 10 percent live under the federal poverty line.

“Like any city, we have our share of challenges,” Mayor Sam Liccardo says. “But there’s a lot about San José that can be a model for others in the country. If we can get things right, it can be the next great American city, the next great model of a multicultural, diverse city.”

Underlying San José’s aspirations is a foundational belief in balancing innovation with equity and inclusion. It’s a new take on the Silicon Valley-esque mindset of growth at all costs. And it’s at the core of its “Smart City Vision” to deploy data-driven decision making and technology to continuously improve how City Hall serves residents.

Using Data to Bridge the Digital Divide

Universal broadband access is part of the city’s current “Smart City Roadmap.” The fact that people in Silicon Valley’s largest city lack broadband access was unacceptable to city leaders, so in 2016, working from the premise that internet access is a basic human right in the 21st century, Mayor Liccardo launched the Digital Inclusion Fund, pledging to close the digital divide.

Led by the Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation and the City’s Office of Civic Innovation and Digital Strategy, this public-private partnership between local government teams and external partners is believed to be the nation’s largest cross-sector digital inclusion effort to date.

The first step was to learn who lacked access. Working with external partners such as Stanford University, the City’s digital inclusion team used a variety of data sources to identify over 95,000 San Jose households without access to broadband. After creating a heat map of the digital divide down to the neighborhood level, the team canvassed over 600 residents and conducted street surveys and interviews in multiple languages to identify primary barriers to access.

Digital exclusion heat maps developed by the city to identify “digital deserts” and further identify which populations have the least access to a broadband connection. Image courtesy of the City of San José.

“We knew we needed to bring ‘hyper local’ solutions to San José’s digitally underserved communities. We integrated several data sets to develop a geography-based ‘Digital Exclusion HeatMap’ that allows the City and our partners to know exactly where to expand existing programs and develop new solutions — which library, community center, or park, for example, would be most effective in providing free Wi-Fi, device lending, and digital literacy training to our underserved communities in East San José.”

Civic Innovation Director Dolan Beckel

With this essential data in hand, the team identified three critical components for digital inclusion: (1) an affordable broadband connection at home, (2) a working device, and (3) digital literacy skills. The City then made the case to external private-sector funders, including major telecom companies and others in the private sector, to help fund the initiative.

A streetlight in San Jose outfitted with small cell technology. As of June 25, 2020, over 250 small cell sites were on-air and operating across the city, with another 1,479 sites under construction. Image courtesy of the City of San Jose.

Funding for San José’s broadband strategy is bolstered by the deployment of “small cell” technology — basically, 5G-compatible antennae that can be installed on rooftops, streetlights, and other locations. Beckel’s team negotiated innovative outcomes-driven contracts with telecom companies Verizon, AT&T, and Mobilitie on behalf of Sprint: pricing was structured so that the cost per broadband-enabling small cell site built by the telecom giant was tied to the number of sites built. To support residents in need of the other two components of true digital inclusion — working devices and digital literacy — the team set up grant-based contracts with the California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) and local community-based organizations.

The City is now on its way to improving broadband for all San José residents while simultaneously delivering broadband to 50,000 unconnected households by the year 2030. Since the implementation of the digital inclusion program began, 23 grants totaling $1,000,000 have been issued to San José community-based organizations with the goal of achieving 4,000 “adoptions” in the next year (i.e., connecting previously unconnected households to broadband internet access, ensuring household members have the appropriate devices, and providing digital literacy training). Average connectivity speeds across the city have improved fivefold to 30Mbps per second, and permits approved for construction of small cell sites have skyrocketed — up from five permits total in 2017 to more than 70 permits each week as of early 2020.

The vital importance of closing the digital divide and building out a city-wide digital infrastructure that connects all its residents — and ensures equity in digital access — was underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic. San José was one of the first places in the country under a stay-at-home order, which immediately presented challenges for work and education for the thousands of school-aged children in the city.

San Jose’s #SiliconValleyStrong landing page, which was designed specifically for the broader community in Santa Clara County to give and get assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition to its ongoing digital divide work, to respond to the immediate needs at hand, the City quickly partnered with on-demand tech companies like DoorDash to support meal delivery to vulnerable residents. San José also steered critical regional leadership by launching Silicon Valley Strong, a multi-city initiative where residents can give help or get help with COVID-19 related issues. To date, more than 3,000 volunteers have signed up through the online platform, millions of free meals have been distributed throughout the metro area, more than 200 internet-enabled devices have been collected and distributed, and $27 million in donations have been raised.

Fighting Blight While Boosting Resident Engagement: There’s an App for That

San José’s city government has also improved its own digital infrastructure in recent years. In 2019, it launched My San José, a dashboard residents can access either through a mobile app or web browser to both submit service requests and receive service information from the city. Since My San José’s launch, the City has fielded 165,000 service requests a year.

The vision behind this tool, now called San José 311, is to “use data to make it easier for the community and local government to work together to keep San José safe, clean, and engaged,” according to Deputy City Manager Kip Harkness.

San José 311 landing page, where residents can live chat with a city customer service representative, request city services, and view various service data reports.

To that end, the dashboard focuses on five types of service requests: abandoned vehicles, graffiti, illegal dumping, potholes, and streetlight outages. Before, if residents wanted to request services related to these things, they would have to find the right phone number to reach the right call center, and rely on the call center to email the request to the right departments.

Now, residents submit their request through San José 311 and automatically receive information about expected turnaround time and the status of their request. Great customer service is built into the platform where residents receive confirmation that an issue has been resolved and an opportunity to provide feedback to the city. The City can now collect and analyze a robust set of data on specific service request areas and neighborhood needs, and strategically deploy staff and resources to boost efficiency and productivity. Real results have come from the new far more user-friendly system, including:

— Abandoned vehicles. The average initial response time for inoperable vehicle removal dropped from 15 days to four days over the last 12 months. Average time to complete a service request dropped to about nine days, from 27 days. A giant backlog of over 4,000 service requests was prioritized so that important requests were not left waiting, and has now been whittled down so that few high-priority requests remain untackled.

— Illegal dumping. Response times to cleanup requests used to take up to six months — they’ve dropped to less than a week thanks to work done over the past two years. With service requests far easier to make (they’d been handled over the phone historically), they have doubled within a year of the dashboard’s launch. The City staffed up, using service request data to justify an increased number of workers.

These kinds of improvements deliver tangible benefits to residents. Various studies have shown a high degree of correlation between neighborhood cleanliness and crime. The City is determined to use data-driven tools to remove early signs of blight — thereby preventing the need for more police services down the road. And there’s another benefit: Residents involved in service requests report being more engaged with the city, Harkness says.

“Responsiveness matters to those feelings of being heard and being engaged.”

Deputy City Manager Kip Harkness

Further progress is on the way, including language translation in Spanish and Vietnamese to increase community engagement, and piloting a chatbot to help reduce calls into the call center. Additionally, the City plans to add new services to the platform, starting with automating manual processes for recycling. The city is only “scratching the surface on the data we’re getting from San José 311,” Harkness adds.

Charting a ‘Smarter, Leaner’ Future

San Jose’s data-driven, iterative approach to innovation — which embraces “failing fast” to drive continuous improvement — is familiar to anyone who has spent time around tech startups. But the City’s mindset isn’t just a reflection of its Valley surroundings. It’s taken root out of necessity.

Through a long, slow recovery from the Great Recession of 2008, the City has had to use data to drive efficiency. Budget cuts reduced the city’s workforce by 16 percent from its pre-recession peak. Compared to similar-sized cities, San José has an extraordinarily lean staff: 6,700 employees for just over one million residents.

“We’re the leanest big city in the country,” City Manager Dave Sykes says. “We cannot just throw resources at a problem to solve it. We need to be making decisions that are informed. We have to be smarter, leaner about how we do our work.”

“We have the capacity to use Silicon Valley’s genius to make this a valley of opportunity — that’s really important to us,” Beckel says. “We have a core of people who push hard to find different ways to do things better. This is a city and team laser-focused on addressing what matters to people in this city.”

“We are starting to measure what it is that the community wants and support the priorities of elected officials with data. The open data portal is the perfect place around which to coalesce those conversations.” says Chief Data Officer Joseph D’Angelo

A visual representation of the city’s approach to prioritizing work in service of working “leaner and smarter.” Image courtesy of What Works Cities, February 2020.

And, once an initiative gets underway, city officials look for evidence of success quickly. If something “fails fast,” that’s OK — it informs how the city uses resources going forward.

When discussing new projects, Mayor Liccardo frequently challenges his staff to always view a project from the question, “How does this benefit someone in our community who is at greatest risk?” At the end of the day, the city staff’s focus and purpose are here to solve real world problems for the community, particularly those with the most need.

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Phoenix, Arizona, USA

Phoenix is Ready for More Rapid Growth.

Project Type:
Community Engagement, Communications, Cross-Sector, Environment, Equity, Finance, Infrastructure, Public Safety

At a Glance

Continually using data-driven planning and decision-making to prepare increasing temperatures and population numbers.

Crafted a narrative using date to make the case for increased funding for water infrastructure improvements, getting ahead of more costly potential future water shortages down the road.

Used automatic vehicle location (AVL) technology in garbage trucks to collect detailed data tracking pickup routes and analyzed which ways to pick up trash more efficiently, while maintaining safety.

Created HeatReady, a program that identified the highest temperatures and the lowest amount of shade cover, tracked and enabled equitable distribution of investment to support vulnerable areas exposed to extreme heat.

Rapid Growth in Phoenix

You might call it a good problem to have. Every single day between 2010 and 2019, the Phoenix metro area grew by about 200 people. Phoenix has been among the country’s fastest-growing cities for years, according to U.S. Census Bureau data — and it’s expected to double in size by 2040, up from nearly 1.7 million people right now.

“Phoenix was born to grow. For decades, since the 1950s, we have stretched our boundaries and reimagined what a modern desert city can be. And today, we are growing vertically as well. Strategic use of data has been an incredibly valuable guide as we continue to invest in infrastructure, technology, and services that ensure an equitable future for all residents.”

Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego

All this rapid growth puts pressure on essential services — things like water, public safety, and waste management. Ensuring they remain reliable and accessible to all Phoenix residents takes careful planning that aligns infrastructure and services to where growing numbers of people live, work, and play. This is not a new challenge for the desert city, where the average daily high temperature is 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Phoenix’s population began taking off in the 1950s, when air conditioning became commonplace.

The city’s population isn’t the only thing on the rise, however. Climate change is pushing average temperatures higher in the Sonoran Desert, making Phoenix one of the fastest-warming cities in America. But not all residents feel the same heat. The hottest neighborhoods in Phoenix tend to correlate with lower-incomes.

With a hotter and more crowded future on the near horizon, the City of Phoenix is preparing through data-driven planning and decision-making. You can see this in how it is securing the most precious desert resource: water.

Staving Off a Drought With Data

One of Phoenix’s primary sources of water, the Colorado River, is becoming less reliable. City officials know this because they constantly forecast water availability while tracking regional demand and seasonal weather patterns, along with long-term climate change. The data doesn’t look good.

“Water is the lifeblood of any city, especially the fifth largest city in the nation located in the middle of a desert,” says Phoenix City Manager Ed Zuercher. “We have never taken water for granted. Continuous strategic planning throughout the decades, with data at the forefront, has allowed us to effectively manage potential supply challenges and opportunities for growth.”

With trend lines clear, city officials leveraged data to sound the alarm. Kathryn Sorensen, the Director of Phoenix Water Services, stood in front of the Phoenix City Council presenting data integrating economics, hydrology, geography and other subjects. An image of a black swan swam across the slides to underscore the possibility of a “black swan event.” Phoenix taps could run dry if the drought continued and the city remained so reliant on the Colorado River.

The Colorado River, one of Phoenix’s primary sources of water.
Photo by Mark Capurso courtesy of the City of Phoenix.

Elected officials never enjoy raising the costs of essential services. What Phoenix shows is that when the decision-makers have access to data that tell a clear story, hard decisions are made a little easier.

“Part of what we had to do to get the Council to fund big water infrastructure improvements was tell a story about what you’re getting, and why it’s worth it,” Zuercher says. In fact, by acting when it did, the Council avoided a more painful rate jump down the road, when water shortages might be imminent. “Because we started early enough with the 6 percent increase, we don’t have to do an 18 percent increase later,” he adds.

Smarter Trash Collection

Along with water, Phoenix’s rapid growth has increased demand for another basic service: trash removal.

Every 2,000 new homes typically requires a city to expand waste management services with an additional truck and worker, generally speaking. But impressively, for the past 11 years, as an additional 40,000 homes appeared in Phoenix, the city’s Public Works Department has not added one additional garbage truck, waste management worker, or increased collection fees. How did it pull this off? By using data to improve efficiency.

Using automatic vehicle location (AVL) technology in each of its garbage trucks, the city was able to collect detailed data tracking pickup routes across three months in 2019. It then analyzed those routes in search of ways to pick up trash more efficiently, while maintaining safety. Could school zones be avoided while school is in session? Could collection days for residents be strategically changed? Could dangerous left-hand turns be minimized?

AVL was implemented by the department 10+ years ago to fulfill the need of the operations team for real-time data and actionable data. In the beginning, installation of any AVL monitoring device on trucks was done using a phased approach since the collection trucks could not be taken out of service all at the same time. Nowadays, the newer solid waste trucks delivered to the city are already equipped with AVL monitoring devices and technology, per the city’s specifications.

With the help of AVL technology, the department was able to implement “New Way, Same Day” in 2012, which streamlined collections through route-balancing. “New Way, Same Day” allowed the department to collect trash and recycling containers on the same day, resulting in cost savings of about $1 million annually.

The operations team, in collaboration with the information technology and data services teams, have continuously updated and upgraded Phoenix’s AVL technology.

After diving into the geographical and logistical details, the team emerged with new collection routes that balanced safety requirements with the city’s pickup needs. This hadn’t been done since 2009 — a full 10 years prior. With strong communications about the reasons for change to both residents and the waste management workers on the ground, the department successfully updated its collection routes and systems.

Through data and efficiency, despite rapid population growth, the Public Works Department was able to maintain its monthly residential fee for trash and various waste diversion services for 11 years.

Just recently, however, the Phoenix City Council approved a rate increase to the monthly residential fee. Along with the increasing cost of providing a service, China’s stricter recycling policies, announced in 2017, greatly impacted the U.S. recycling industry resulting in a decline in Phoenix’s recycling revenue. The decline in revenue hindered Phoenix’s ability to maintain the current level of trash and recycling service it provides. But through an extensive community engagement effort to educate residents, the City Council felt confident that an increase in solid waste rates was needed to keep up with the demands of a growing metropolis.

“After more than a decade, the recent residential solid waste rate increase allows our department to maintain the same level of trash and recycling services our residents expect,” said Moreno. “We will continue to rely on good data to streamline our processes and make good decisions in managing our resources.”

Everyone Deserves Some Shade

Phoenix is the hottest major city in the United States, and it’s getting hotter. But rising temperatures threaten some residents more than others — parts of Phoenix are less hot than others due to the presence of shade and certain pavement materials.

To understand climate change’s impact on the city from an equity perspective, the city created HeatReady, a program to identify, track and respond to the dangers of urban heat. The program was funded through the Mayors Challenge, a Bloomberg Philanthropies initiative to help U.S. city leaders develop innovative ideas that tackle today’s toughest problems.

The first step was to gather basic data on heat across Phoenix. To do this, the city partnered with Dr. David Hondula, a professor at Arizona State University, who installed heat monitor sensors in eight locations.

“The Bloomberg Mayors Challenge really set us on course to begin coordinating all efforts to address the growing threat of rising urban temperatures in Phoenix. Data continues to guide us in identifying the areas of our city with the highest temperatures and the lowest amount of shade cover, enabling an equitable distribution of investment to support those most vulnerable to extreme heat.”

Deputy City Manager Karen Peters

Building on its long-standing partnership with Arizona State University, the city collaborated with researchers at ASU’s Urban Climate Research Center to gather and synthesize meteorological data from all across the city and install new sensors. Among the key findings: on the hottest days of the year, surface temperatures varied by up to 13 degrees between different neighborhoods, depending on greenness, shade cover, and other factors. The hottest spots were often in low-income communities. Dr. Hondula and his collaborators are now collecting long-term data in some of the city’s hottest neighborhoods to help the city track its progress over time in reducing heat inequities.

“Our partnership with the city on urban heat is a point of pride for the urban climate research community at ASU. We share the city’s desire to identify and prioritize the hottest and most vulnerable neighborhoods for future cooling investments. The opportunity to work in real-world settings also gives us unparalleled access to learn more about how the urban climate system works and how it can be improved, knowledge that we will work to translate into solutions with city and community partners.”

Arizona State University Professor Dr. David Hondula

The city plans to continue working with its partners at Arizona State University to place sensors throughout the city, and leverage data by strategically improving the built environment. For example, it will create shade in places where residents are in greatest need of walkable routes to public transit, and has begun resurfacing roads in pilot areas with lighter-colored pavement that doesn’t retain as much heat. There is potential for new buildings to be oriented to create better airflow and more shade in high-need places. The city continues to partner with non-profit agencies to offer cooling stations with free bottles of water and heat-safety information, at locations chosen based on heat data and public transit ridership.

Phoenix’s flyer on the warning signs of heat exhaustion
Source: Phoenix Summer Heat Safety.

HeatReady has just begun — the city is currently seeking additional funding for the program and planning to implement a comprehensive shade and cooling plan built from gathered data. But the program already shows a valuable way forward for cities on the frontlines of climate change. The city and Arizona State University are in the final stage of the development of a HeatReady assessment to measure a city’s “heat readiness.” Phoenix will be the pilot city to complete the assessment this year.

Read more about Phoenix’s journey here.

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Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Philadelphia Champions Collaboration and Data to Increase Opportunity.

Project Type:
Community Engagement, Communications, Cross-Sector, Economic Development, Equity, Finance, High-Performing Government, Homelessness

At a Glance

Created an open data program that prioritized cross-departmental collaboration to secure the best possible equitable outcomes for residents.

Helped the city save money and amplify the impact of its programs and services such as reducing litter, social rewards and school district meetings with teachers through the Philadelphia Behavioral Science Initiative.

Through a detailed and thoughtful analysis of the City’s homeless intake system to maximize efficiency and effectiveness.

Philadelphia’s Open Data Program

In a room adjacent to Mayor Jim Kenney’s office stands a long wooden table where he often holds meetings. He chooses to sit in the middle of the table, embodying his commitment to distributed leadership and collaborative problem-solving in the City of Philadelphia.

As the birthplace of American democracy, the City of Philadelphia is no newcomer to collaborative leadership. To find sustainable solutions that get results, the City pairs data-driven decision-making with efforts to ensure key stakeholders — from inside and outside City Hall — bring their varied perspectives to the task of solving local challenges. Whether it be city agencies, academic partners, or local businesses, everyone has a role to play in building a better city.

Philadelphia’s open data program is executed by the Office of Innovation and Technology CityGeo team. By using the department’s platform, Atlas, residents can easily access city data on permit history, licenses, and 311, and more; much of the data is also mapped via GIS. To open up an additional 300 data sets of information on both municipal and non-municipal data across the region, the City partnered with a local geospatial firm to build OpenDataPhilly. And the Open Budget section of the Philadelphia website shares how the City is spending taxpayer dollars alongside data visualizations that make the numbers digestible. To make the connection between innovation and city data more apparent, the City has collaborated with Temple University’s Department of Journalism to showcase the experiences of residents, from business owners to activists, who have used the City’s open data.

The City’s strong collaborative foundation has enabled it to incorporate data into nearly every aspect of governance. From silo-busting behavioral science initiatives to equity-building workforce development efforts, Philadelphia’s increasingly innovative programs are delivering better outcomes for residents — and opening up even more seats at the table.

Spreading Behavioral Insights

The results of the trial were so promising that Mayor Kenny and his administration established the Philadelphia Behavioral Science Initiative (PBSI) in 2016 to continue improving the City’s delivery of services. In 2017, PBSI grew to become a key branch of GovlabPHL, the City’s multi-agency team focused on bringing evidence-based and data-driven practices to city programs and initiatives through cross-sector collaboration.
Now when departments have a policy issue or a possible project, they are teamed with local academic researchers whose expertise matches the nature of the work. From there, the City and academics collaborate to determine the goals and the kind of data that will need to be collected, and to create a data-licensing agreement. The trials run through PBSI have already helped the City save money and amplify the impact of its programs and services, including reducing litter, as well as putting social rewards and identity salience to the test with school district teachers. Each year, the City of Philadelphia co-hosts an annual conference to generate new research partnerships and ideas.

The relationship through PBSI is a win-win for everyone, with the City working to better serve residents, while academics are able to test hypotheses that could turn into potentially publishable studies.

Improving City Service Delivery

The Office of Open Data and Digital Transformation (ODDT) believes in a City government that supports the success and well-being of all Philadelphians. ODDT is composed of a multi-disciplinary team who has deep expertise in design research, service design, content strategy, product design, and accessible technology development. With these comprehensive skill sets, the team partners with policy-makers, service providers, and the public to transform policy ideas into holistic and implementable solutions that meet people’s service delivery needs — improving how the government serves the public from an evidence-based design perspective.

Stakeholder engagement is a crucial component of the PHL Participatory Design Lab.

For example, through the City’s PHL Participatory Design Lab which is co-led by ODDT and funded by the Knight Cities Challenge, the City’s homeless intake system has become a learning lab for service design. Through a detailed and thoughtful process of journey mapping, identifying “pain points,” and soliciting input and feedback from those seeking services and staff who help them, the Lab identified two main areas for improvement. They are: 1) approaching information as a service, such as through transforming informational materials like signs, videos, and forms to better equip people with knowledge of what to expect, and through making the service delivery process more of a partnership and 2) improving physical space. Both ideas seek to improve the experience of people entering the homeless system and the experience of the staff working with them to maximize efficiency and effectiveness.

Supporting Local Business Owners

Another crucial community partner — local businesses — were once disadvantaged by outdated contracting laws. The City’s charter formerly required that contracts be awarded to the bidder with the lowest price, regardless of the contractor’s level of experience or other considerations. In May 2017, the City went to voters with a measure to award contracts based on factors such as expertise, quality, and experience to ensure that taxpayer dollars were leading to the best possible outcomes. Voters passed the new law to shift from “low-bid” to “best-value” procurement. The $25 million the City spends every year on food services — from after-school programs to feeding people experiencing homelessness — is one of the first areas the City is applying the new approach toward, teaming up with the Sunlight Foundation.

Philadelphia has since structured its RFPs around strategic goals and desired outcomes that can be measured through performance metrics. And to help leverage the expertise of previously overlooked vendors, the City has implemented a point system in its RFPs that rewards contractors on certain criteria; one of them is being a local business, helping the City work toward its goal of reinvesting more taxpayer dollars back into the local economy through vendors that were once priced out by less expensive options. The City is also prioritizing increasing the number of contracts with minority-owned and women-owned businesses.

Investing in the Future Generation

A focus on stronger collaboration between the city government and residents is also transforming the very composition of City Hall. Philadelphia yearns to build a government for its residents, by its residents. But when the City looked into employment data, the average age of a City employee was 45 years old, and Philadelphia’s diversity was hardly reflected in the government workforce.

Mayor Jim Kenny meets with a member of Philadelphia’s workforce.

The problem was not so much how to create talent, but how to get it into the pipeline. Part of the City’s workforce development strategy is designed to activate talent in the city and connect young people, communities of color, low-income neighborhoods, and formerly incarcerated individuals to family-sustaining jobs — and City government is ripe with these kinds of employment opportunities. In collaboration with ten city departments, the City as Model Employer program hopes to transition a minimum of 200 underserved individuals from temporary work into permanent employment by 2020.

While there’s still progress to be made, Philadelphia’s vision is clear: The future will be imagined around an inclusive table.

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Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Minneapolis’ Data-Driven Green Cost share Program Delivers Environmental Justice.

Project Type:
Cross Sector, Economic Development, Energy, Environment, Equity, High-Performing Government

At a Glance

Prevented more than 11,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere through a data-driven incentive program to help Minneapolis property owners invest in energy efficiency upgrades and other green projects.

Developed a Green Career Program to increase solar and energy-efficient jobs, economic opportunities, and awareness – particularly in underserved neighborhoods where data showed less participation in green initiatives.

Created the 4d Affordable Housing program for building owners to keep units affordable and maintain energy efficient upgrades for residents.

Minneapolis’s Efforts to Reduce Greenhouse Gasses

The City of Minneapolis has a long history of enacting progressive policies to tackle climate change. Back in 1993, it joined forces with neighboring St. Paul to reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses (GHG) into the atmosphere with its Urban CO2 Project Plan. In 2012, Minneapolis set the ambitious goals of cutting GHG emissions 30 percent by 2025, and 80 percent by 2050.

That same year, Minneapolis took another innovative step with the creation of its Green Cost Share program. It was launched by the City’s Department of Health as an incentive-based — rather than punitive — way to reduce pollution and address climate change. The basic idea is this: The City offers matching funds to residential, commercial, and industrial property owners as an incentive to invest in energy efficiency and pollution reduction projects. The resulting improvements help the City move closer to achieving its climate change goals while also addressing public health inequities.

Data-driven performance management and open data are at the core of the Green Cost Share program — and are playing a growing role in the City overall. In recent years, Minneapolis has strengthened other foundational practices as well, including general management and data governance, all of which help in the City’s efforts to monitor and utilize relevant data. Leaders of the Green Cost Share program collect data on dollars invested, estimated lifetime energy bill savings, and pollutants reduced. And they make everything public through a dashboard presenting all the metrics.

“From how we track progress toward program goals to how we target underinvested parts of the city overdue for environmental justice, data is in many ways the engine of Green Cost Share,” says Patrick Hanlon, who runs the program as director of environmental programs for the City of Minneapolis.

The program kicked off by building partnerships with dry cleaning companies to end their use of perchloroethylene, a cleaning solvent and known toxic air pollutant that may cause asthma, birth defects, and cancer. By 2018, Minneapolis became the first city in the country to be completely “perc”-free.

A rooftop solar project incentivized by the Green Cost Share program. Image courtesy of the City of Minneapolis.

That was just one program goal. By offering property owners 20 percent of project costs (up to $20,000), the Green Cost Share program has also incentivized the installation of solar arrays, insulation, high-efficiency water heaters and furnaces, and other pollution-reduction improvements across the City. The program’s specific impacts since 2013 are detailed in the dashboard: 580 projects have received match funding, saving 31.8 million kilowatt hours of energy. That’s prevented more than 11,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere — the equivalent of taking over 2,400 cars off the road. Combined, program recipients will be saving over $50,000,000 over the lifetime of their projects.

“Tracking and analyzing data has helped us both define and prove success, as well as course-correct as the program has evolved over the years.”

Director of Environmental Programs Patrick Hanlon

Data-Driven Course-Correcting

The Green Cost Share program’s use of data goes beyond demonstrating impact, however. To ensure the program helps improve public health measures and delivers environmental justice, staff have ramped-up efforts to engage property owners in areas of Minneapolis defined as high-need.

In 2017, program staff noticed they weren’t receiving many applications from areas designated as Green Zones. Mostly located in north and south Minneapolis, the zones were defined by community groups based on demographic, economic and public health data provided by the City. They have higher concentrations of low-income residents and communities of color, and histories of practices like redlining and lease covenants. Not coincidentally, these areas also often have high levels of pollution related to traffic and stationary pollution sources, brownfield sites, and substandard housing. The City’s Green Zone task force expressed a desire for more investment in renewables, energy efficiency, and green jobs.

With the goal of inspiring more projects in the zones and support from the mayor and City Council, the Environmental Programs team adjusted the program’s match funding formula. It began offering a 30 percent match rate of up to $30,000 to applicants in the Green Zones or Great Streets program, another revitalization program that targets areas where people of color and low-income residents are concentrated. Before 2017, only about 20 percent of program participants were environmental justice properties. Today, the figure is 58 percent.

The City of Minneapolis has developed various strategies to support economic recovery from the pandemic and address racial inequities. As part of that comprehensive approach, the Green Cost Share program matches 40 percent (up to $40,000) of the cost to rebuild properties damaged during protests last year following George Floyd’s killing at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, which sparked a national movement for racial justice. The program continues to look for ways to provide additional incentives, prioritize projects, and build relationships in environmental justice communities. One way it is doing this: A Green Career program launched last year in partnership with the Department of Community Planning & Economic Development (CPED) that focuses on training residents in BIPOC communities for jobs with solar and energy-efficiency contractors. The City is tracking data to evaluate program outcomes.

Green Career program participants and city staff. Image courtesy of the City of Minneapolis.

For all its activities and projects, the Environmental Programs team collects and analyzes data to identify areas for improvement. One need that’s emerged from analysis: a better group purchase program allowing solar developers to aggregate smaller projects like single-family homes to be submitted in bulk to both take advantage of the incentive and reduce overall project costs.

The team also received community feedback about the lack of energy-efficiency projects being done in larger apartment buildings with low-income tenants. A data analysis bore this out, so the Environmental Programs team partnered with the CPED department on its successful 4d Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing program. The 4d program, which provides incentives for building owners to keep units affordable, has successfully helped building owners make energy efficiency upgrades after they signed up for the incentives. The results were significant — Green Cost Share projects in buildings with over 1,000 tenants rose sharply, from three to 49.

“Those are the kind of opportunities that can be revealed by regular, robust project data analysis.”

Contract Manager Isaac Evans

The program is also working to obtain better demographic data about project applicants to make further progress on environmental justice goals. Applications can request (but cannot require) demographic data from applicants; the team is working to improve data sharing between city departments to supplement information and improve demographic data tracking.

“The Green Cost Share program can’t succeed in a silo and it can’t succeed without strong data practices,” Hanlon says. “To align with the City’s overarching climate and equity goals, we know we have to work hand-in-hand with colleagues across city government and residents in need. Sustained collaboration and proactive data-driven performance management are both key to success — for all City programs, really.”

“We look at this program as a way we can intentionally invest back into communities that have been discriminated against historically.”

Director of Environmental Programs Patrick Hanlon

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Madison, Wisconsin, USA

With a Strong Data Foundation, Madison Reaches for Equity Goals.

Project Type:
Equity, Finance, Health & Engagement, High-Performing Government, Public Safety

At a Glance

Eliminated library overdue fines after data showed that they were barriers for residents from low-income areas getting library cards.

Assessed how to best use data through a more results-oriented allocation of budget resources lens rather than just looking at how a department will spend its allocation.

Advanced equity initiatives through data to analyze whether chosen city vendors reflect Madison’s racial demographics and design a $600,000 pilot program that establishes an unarmed alternative response to 911 calls involving mental or behavioral health emergencies.

Results Madison

The Madison Public Library knows that small actions can have big consequences.

When city officials decided to eliminate library fines last year, forgiving $282,000 in uncollected fees across more than 33,000 accounts, they had to make some painful cuts to balance the budget. But the need for change was clear: Library staff had heard over and over from parents who didn’t want to get their children library cards out of fear the kids would rack up fines parents could not pay. Already feeling strapped, the last thing they wanted was one more letter from a debt collector.

The library system’s data confirmed the fines system acted as a barrier to equitable access: Low-income residents were being disproportionately affected by the library system’s fines policy. While around 4 percent of accounts in higher-income neighborhoods had been blocked due to delinquency, that figure was as high as 12 percent in lower-income neighborhoods.

So the City acted. “Eliminating overdue fines and ceasing to use a collection agency demonstrates a commitment to equity and literacy,” Madison Public Library Director Greg Mickells says. Since the policy change, the City has seen library card usage by residents from low-income areas rise.

A Madison Public Library branch. Image courtesy of the City of Madison.

The initiative to eliminate library fees is just one example of how Wisconsin’s capital is using data to identify and eliminate inequities in its services and how it delivers them. The City has embarked on a multiyear effort to overhaul its budget process to place results and performance, rather than dollar amounts, front and center.

The ambitious effort, called Results Madison, involves defining outcomes, strategies, indicators, services, and performance measures for every department and linking those to spending. It’s a product of the City’s commitment to building a strong data foundation to support its equity goals and new governance approaches. Madison has advanced its ability to deliver results for residents by strengthening metrics-driven performance management and open data practices. The latter involved standardizing data and sharing it, to support robust, automated performance analytics.

Previously, city leaders would determine budgets by looking at last year’s numbers. The goal now, with Results Madison, is to assess what is needed to meet the following year’s goals. Rather than look at how a department will spend its allocation, the focus is now on how results will be achieved.

“This really started with our racial equity and social justice initiative,” says David Schmiedicke, Madison’s finance director. “Core to that was how data can be better used in the City, specifically toward a more results-oriented allocation of budget resources.”

The City engaged residents in a series of meetings while creating its current comprehensive plan. The plan is the strategic backbone of Results Madison. Image courtesy of the City of Madison.

The plan is for a city agency to pilot changes next year, modeling what change looks like for the rest of the government. One-third of all agencies will migrate to new budget- and results-tracking services by the end of 2022, if all goes to plan. Full implementation is expected in 2027, once the City’s enterprise resource planning system has been updated to reflect the new budget process.

The Results Madison effort, facilitated by the Finance Department working with agency stakeholder leads, is intentionally giving decision makers within agencies time to grow accustomed to change and feel comfortable with the validity of new performance measures. While some agencies will have no trouble establishing metrics to track, others might have more difficulty, Schmiedicke notes.

“At the core of this effort is to fundamentally change how we think about budgets, and arrive at a more holistic approach that foregrounds data and results — what we as a city are doing for residents, and how.”

Finance Director David Schmiedick

Leading Data with Analysis

Data is taking center stage in other ways as Madison advances equity initiatives. For example, the City is gathering baseline data on city contracts to determine whether chosen vendors reflect Madison’s racial demographics. It also analyzed a wide array of data relating to emergency response services and mental health before designing a $600,000 pilot program that establishes an unarmed alternative response to 911 calls involving mental or behavioral health emergencies. It’s called Community Alternative Response Emergency Services, or CARES.

The data showed that the Madison Police Department was responding to an average of 20 calls per day related to these situations. Each call took about three hours of officer time. “Law enforcement has typically responded to mental health calls, and the data really put into relief how time-consuming these situations are,” says Che Stedman, assistant chief of medical affairs in the Madison Fire Department, which houses the City’s Emergency Medical Services. “We ended up asking: How can we do better?”

The pilot, which launched in fall 2021, aimed to identify a better way to respond. The initial plan was to pair paramedics with crisis workers who have clinical experience, as well as training in trauma-informed de-escalation, harm reduction strategies, and cultural competency. These unarmed teams will free up police officers to focus on incidents threatening public safety.

Plotting the police data on a map showed that mental health calls were concentrated downtown. Most came in between 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. on weekdays. Without that information, Stedman says he probably would have guessed the pilot should run on weekends or later in the evening.

“The fact is that I wouldn’t have designed the program the way that we’re going to do it, and I would have been wrong. Whether we are going to expand geographically first or expand the time of day or to seven days a week — all that’s going to be very data-driven.”

Assistant Chief of Medical Affairs Che Stedman

Through the CARES pilot, the library fines policy shift, and other efforts, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway says Madison’s commitment to data governance is paying off. “I am proud of Madison’s recognition as a ‘What Works Certified City’ — it shows that our work to make data-driven decisions is effective,” she says. “Our focus on equitable and innovative use of data helps us make city government more responsive and efficient. I am confident that our work will bring more success stories in the future.”

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Los Angeles, California, USA

Los Angeles: City of Angels Leads in Transforming Data into Action.

Project Type:
Community Engagement, Communications, Cross-Sector, Equity, Finance, High-Performing Government, Housing, Infrastructure

At a Glance

Published key metrics of success on the Mayor’s Dashboard allowing residents to see how the City is performing.

CleanStat measures quarterly, block-by-block assessments of the entire city to build data on and identify trends in street cleanliness.

After examining an index combining data of displacement patterns with predictive analysis, LA launched a campaign to raise awareness for tenants’ rights, reaching over 20,000 residents in the first year.

Open Data portal provide residents easy access to mapped sets of open data related to health, safety, schools and more.

How LA Measures Success

Los Angeles City Hall has a room with a view. Visitors who make their way to the building’s public observation deck can enjoy a vast panorama of the city below, home to some 3.9 million people. Inside City Hall, the permeation of what works practices is vast; one gets the sense that, after his election, Mayor Eric Garcetti came to the observation deck, looked around, and set out to determine how to embed data in everything the City touches.

That’s why one of his first moves as Mayor was to ensure that all 36 of the City’s General Managers develop key metrics of success for their departments, and then began tracking the data that would monitor progress toward their goals. Their progress is published on the Mayor’s Dashboard, where residents can see for themselves how well the City is performing — setting a new precedent for transparency in municipal service provision.

“Data shines a light on the problem and inspires targeted action. It allows us to be more proactive, more efficient, and more engaging.”

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti

CleanStat

As part of his Back to Basics approach, Mayor Garcetti launched CleanStat in 2016, so that all communities, regardless of their economic status, could enjoy clean streets. CleanStat, the nation’s most comprehensive street-by-street cleanliness assessment system, provides quarterly, block-by-block assessments of the entire city to build data on and identify trends in street cleanliness.

A sanitation worker assigns a cleanliness score to an LA street, part of the City’s Clean Streets initiative. (Photo credit: Los Angeles Times)

“When I came into office, my priority was to improve the quality of life for all Angelenos, and the use of data in assessment, monitoring, and implementation helped us achieve that,” says Mayor Garcetti. “Using data allowed our street-cleaning efforts to shift away from a reactive approach, and instead, focus on a methodical and equitable way.”

With CleanStat, staff from the Bureau of Sanitation drive all of the more than 20,000 miles of the city’s public streets and alleys, assigning a cleanliness score from 1 to 3 — or from clean to not clean — to every block, once a quarter. Those scores are added to the Clean Streets Index, where department officials can keep track of performance and residents can hold the City accountable for its goal to eradicate red grids (ones with a score of 3) by 2018. Residents who want to get more directly involved can sign up for the Clean Streets LA Challenge, with the potential to secure funding for a project to make their neighborhood cleaner.

Before and after a Clean Streets cleanup.

Because workers are generating service requests as they conduct assessments, the new approach is helping the department become more targeted in its response. Now, resources can be deployed to meet the specific needs of the site, and response teams can maximize efficiency. The department is also addressing between 4,000 and 6,000 service requests each quarter that wouldn’t have been called in otherwise, meaning streets are being cleaned more quickly. The results speak for themselves — just one year after its launch, the City had already reduced the number of unclean streets by 82%.

Rent Stabilization Ordinance Campaign

As in so many cities across the country, ensuring adequate access to affordable housing is a growing challenge in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, tenants living in any of the nearly 624,000 units covered by the City’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance (RSO) have many rights that aim to keep them in their homes, including protection from excessive rent increases. But when the City’s Housing and Community Investment Department (HCIDLA) began to survey residents, staff made an alarming discovery: nearly one third of renters and nearly as many landlords were wrong about — or were not even aware of — their rights and responsibilities under the RSO.

Data helped LA identify which neighborhoods to target with a campaign to raise awareness of tenant rights under the City’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance.

Through Mayor Garcetti’s Innovation Team (i-team) within his Office of Budget and Innovation, the City of Los Angeles launched a multi-faceted Home for Renters campaign in 2016 to raise awareness of tenant rights through direct outreach, the creation and distribution of easy-to-understand educational guidebooks, placement of PSAs, and more. To ensure the campaign targeted the most vulnerable residents, the i-team examined an index combining data of displacement patterns with predictive analysis on where displacement was likely to occur, mainly households with incomes under $30,000 and areas with high concentrations of RSO housing units and complaints. In its first year, the campaign has reached over 20,000 people online, and more through rigorous field outreach, multilingual handbooks, and strategic ad placement on city buses and benches — all with the goal of increasing the awareness of rights and responsibilities for tenants and landlords under the RSO.

More City Data, More City Solutions

A culture of data use has led to other notable developments, including a new portal tracking all city-owned properties so that staff across departments can better maximize available real estate assets when looking to develop new public amenities. A recent call for a Chief Procurement Officer demonstrates the City’s commitment to modernize the City’s procurement process in response to new technological advancements and data-collection capabilities. Through its Data Science Federation, the City is partnering with local colleges and universities to accelerate its use of data-driven tools at the same time that it’s creating a pipeline to bring new talent into local government. And the City is using data to see what works and what doesn’t as it pilots potential solutions to such challenges as police hiring, problem intersections, and the urban heat island effect before scaling them.

The City’s focus on data also aims to increase civic engagement with residents. Los Angeles’ open data portal greets visitors with an invitation to “find the data useful for you,” while the City’s GeoHub empowers residents with quick access to mapped sets of open data related to health, safety, schools, and more. These efforts are as much about fostering transparency as they are about working to build relationships with residents centered on collaboration and problem-solving.

“When the City gives residents the information to discuss our challenges, we are opening the door for them to help us work towards the right solutions. Los Angeles is a city that leads, and we are proud to pave the way for greater inclusion, opportunity, and equity for our residents in an era of accessible data that’s also ripe for innovation.”

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti

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