JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Mayor Donna Deegan launched an initiative called “State of Jax” to highlight Jacksonville’s most pressing challenges and opportunities.
Deegan spoke at the news conference with Parvez Ahmed, the city’s chief of analytics and Moez Limayem, the president of the University of North Florida.
The mayor’s office said that it will make economic, health, education, and social indicators easily accessible to policymakers, community leaders, and the public to make more data-driven decisions for public and philanthropic spending.
“While performance metrics tell us how effectively our city dollars are being used, we also need complementary data to understand how our outcomes compare to other cities and to help us target our limited resources to where they are needed most,” Deegan said.
The project is a unique public-private partnership that uses data to make Jacksonville a better city. The data tracks life from beginning to end and shows the strengths and weaknesses of all 198 neighborhoods in Duval County.
For example, data showed a drastic difference between College Park (District 10) and Mandarin (District 3).
“We have a life discrepancy of 10 years, across zip codes, it’s 12 years, but across neighborhoods, it’s 25 years,” Ahmed said.
It’s an opportunity for improvement in College Park.
Ahmed also talked about the rapid growth rate of Jacksonville’s population and how the city needs to manage it.
“Data will bring accountability, data will create trust, and ultimately, data will help us drive the change that we are looking for,” Ahmed said.
Limayem started a similar project in Tampa nearly a decade ago.
“My prediction is that...we will have two types of cities in our country. The winners and the losers. And what separates the winners from the losers is exactly this the ability to look at the data and leverage on the data and use it to move the needle to progress. To make our city the best city, a world class city,” Limayem said.
Deegan said they are already working forward to improve the community and the data research will be ongoing.
She hopes this progress will continue long after her leadership as mayor ends.
“Whether these things come to full fruition and they won’t, in the time that I’m here. It’s going to be an ongoing thing. My hope is in 25 years when we have all those additional people here in Jacksonville that we will be talking about our quality of life and not our problems,” Deegan said.
Click here for the State of Jax website to see data and reports.
The full news conference can be seen below.