Today Las Vegas launched its new Results Vegas website, making it easy for the public to monitor progress on municipal goals and to understand how the city is working to tackle major challenges facing the community.
December 5, 2016 – A few months ago on the What Works Cities blog, City Manager Betsy Fretwell shared how Las Vegas’s new performance management system, Results Vegas, is helping us use data to drive results and achieve the city’s core purpose: building community to make life better for residents. With the assistance of the What Works Cities Initiative, Las Vegas has taken a fresh look at how it can use data to improve services, inform decision-making, and engage the community, and Results Vegas continues to be an important part of that work.
We have made a lot of progress over the past year. We built a top-notch team that has been working with city departments to set outcome-oriented goals that are aligned to one of four citywide priorities: growing economy, neighborhood livability, community risk reduction, and high-performing government. Obtaining stakeholder input has been an intrinsic component of the goal-setting process. We have also revamped our performance management meetings to break down silos. Each month, the City Manager’s Office convenes all the departments working on one of the citywide priorities to discuss progress on goals, foster synergies between departments, and identify opportunities to collaborate to achieve goals.
Victoria Carreon leads a discussion on growing the local economy at the first Results Vegas meeting.
Now, Las Vegas is taking data transparency to the next level. To build on our stakeholder engagement efforts and make it easy for the public to monitor progress on the city’s goals, we launched the Results Vegas website today. The new website takes data from our open data portal and brings it to life with dashboards that feature dynamic narratives and interactive charts and maps. These dashboards can help residents, businesses, and other community members understand how the city is working to tackle major challenges facing the community.
The first five goals featured on the Results Vegas website are tied to major city initiatives.
1. Economic Diversification: Improve the economic base by increasing taxable value of real property by 9 percent year over year. To do this, the city is focused on job growth in targeted sectors and increasing downtown housing units, occupied commercial space, and city-funded parking spaces.
2. Transportation Mobility: Increase to 15 percent the proportion of city residents who use alternative modes of transportation to get to work by 2025. To accomplish this, the city is aiming to improve accessibility to and the comfort of bike lanes, set bus stops back from the curb to improve bus safety, and reduce pedestrian crashes.
3. Education: Increase the high school graduation rate in the impact zone (Western, Valley, and West Prep high schools) to 82 percent by January 2030. To achieve this goal, the city is focused on improving kindergarten and workforce readiness, and reducing chronic absenteeism as well as teacher vacancies at the start of the school year.
4. Homelessness: Reduce overall homelessness in the urban core by 5 percent by June 2017. To accomplish this, the city is increasing wet shelter beds and the percentage of clients with stable housing, improving acceptance of services through proactive outreach, growing the number of volunteers, and reducing encampments in the Corridor of Hope in downtown Las Vegas.
5. Community Risk Reduction: Reduce fire and rescue calls for service per capita by 5 percent by 2021. To reach this goal, the city aims to improve alignment of the type of emergency response to the need, reduce hazards identified through inspections, and increase survival from cardiac arrest.
As you can see, these goals aim to be bold, visionary, and transformative. By making our goals public, we hope to build and maintain momentum for innovation and change within our city. Moving forward, Las Vegas plans to continue to weave Results Vegas into the fabric of the city’s day-to-day operations, including strategic planning, budgeting, policies, programs, and management decisions.
