Wanyonyi Kendrick, chief information officer for the city of Jacksonville, describes the features of the city's new Transparency Dashboards. | Casmira Harrison, Jacksonville Today
Published on March 5, 2024 at 1:02 pm
Jacksonville residents have a new way to find a variety of public information, from animal control to road resurfacing and building permits.
The city on Tuesday announced the launch of the Mayor’s Transparency Dashboards. The collection of web pages detail information about Animal Care and Protective Services, Permitting, Public Works and the new River City Readers program.
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Mayor Donna Deegan said the dashboards are not intended to make the city look good. The purpose is to “bring people into City Hall” and provide transparency, she said.
“We are working very hard to make sure that, as hopefully we continue to meet the goals of this administration, we are able to show that,” Deegan said. “It’s important not only to get people interactive with their own government, which was one of the goals of this administration, but to bring people inside City Hall. People feel empowered that they know information, that they can connect with that information, then they will be more likely to engage with that city government, and we really want that.”
Chief Information Officer Wanyonyi Kendrick added: “When I interviewed with the mayor, the first thing she said to me was that she wanted to provide transparency to the city. Therefore, these have been in the works for several months. … The internal team that’s been involved has been heads down for probably the past 12 weeks.”
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The four dashboards are posted on the homepage of the recently renamed city website, jacksonville.gov.
Permitting
The Permitting dashboard uses information from the city’s new JAXEPICS program to provide statistics for the three most common permitting types: residential single-family, non-residential tenant buildings and residential apartments. As of Tuesday, the page showed that 9,460 residential single-family permits had been issued in the last 12 months, plus 783 for residential and non-residential buildings.
The JAXEPICS program streamlines the process of submitting and approving permits, meaning they can be issued more quickly, city officials said.
“You can also drill into this information if you are looking for further details,” Kendrick said. “And again, you can see the trend over time as well, and you can go back, I believe, to 2021 in terms of most of this information. And this specific dashboard goes all the way up to March 4. … If the data is available in real time, it will be updated daily.”
The Permitting dashboard also lets users follow their permit process, Kendrick said.
Public Works
Resurfacing roads, mowing public spaces and handling waste management is the role of Public Works, and that new window showcases the miles of resurfaced road ( 85.79), acres of grass mowed (116,184) and percentage of garbage pickups over the past 12 months (99.97%).
“What I found most interesting in terms of waste management success is the number of pickups that we have on a monthly basis,” she said.
Animal care
The number of dogs and cats taken in by Animal Care and Protective Services (9,073), as well as how many surgeries it has performed (3,352) in the past 12 months are posted on that page. Almost half of the animals taken in over the past 12 months (46.94%) have been given up by owners, with 42.6% strays caught by the division, the site shows.
The shelter on Forest Street has an 88.5% save rate as animals are adopted, returned to owners or sent to other agencies, the website shows.
“We need you to adopt those little pups,” Kendrick said. “Stop by the shelter any time. Even if you can’t adopt right now, volunteer and take a dog for a run or a walk — we can all do better in terms of supporting our animals.”
The shelter sees an average of about 400 animals daily from May to December and averages about 60 volunteer hours daily during those same months, the city said.
River City Readers
The final transparency page details Deegan’s new River City Readers program, kicked off in late January with a goal of getting children to read every day. The web page shows more than 480 readers signed up, most between the ages of 6 and 10.
Kendrick said the four transparency pages posted now are just a start. Another page will debut in a few weeks to cover the city’s capital improvement projects — major new municipal facilities or additions to existing ones.
“We are working on a two-phase approach. One is for Downtown, 26 projects, I believe,” she said. “Then our goal is to expand to all (capital improvement projects), which I believe are about 504, and that will be at a council district level.”
If there are other types of city information that people want to see, let the city know, Kendrick said.
Lead image: Wanyonyi Kendrick, chief information officer for the city of Jacksonville, describes the features of the city’s new Transparency Dashboards. | Casmira Harrison, Jacksonville Today
