About seven months after Gov. Rick Snyder signed a bill into law mandating local governments publicly provide performance gauges, the reaction from community leaders has been mixed.
A portion of the law — which was passed in June 2011 — required local governments to compile a “performance dashboard” and a citizen’s guide with various indicators of economic success by Oct. 1, 2011 or risk losing state funding, among other requirements.
Known as the Economic Vitality Incentive Program, it said local governments should model their own system on Snyder’s Michigan Dashboard program , an initiative put together by the state to measure economic strength, health, education and public safety, among other things.
The law forced East Lansing officials to recompile data they already had into a different format similar to the state’s dashboard, Mayor Pro Tem Nathan Triplett said.
The Legislature made a “big show” out of forcing communities to create dashboards, Triplett said, noting other communities already had been engaged in the process of collecting and distributing financial information before the law passed.
East Lansing’s dashboard measures fiscal stability, quality of life, public safety and economic strength, according to the document, and features statistics and percentage changes between 2010 and 2011.
The most recent version of the dashboard shows that unemployment in the city dropped 7.9 percent from 2010 to 2011, but the average age of critical infrastructure in the city went up 7.4 percent.
Had East Lansing not met the requirements for posting, the city would have lost out on about $1.8 million in state revenue, Triplett said.
The city previously used metrics to track its performance for several years, Triplett said.
“We welcomed the opportunity to demonstrate the great success (we’ve had financially),” Triplett said.
Setting up the dashboard presented no significant financial burden to the city other than reformatting the information they already had, Triplett said.
While the dashboard measures the city’s health at large, it is not required to include specific information about issues related to the city’s involvement with the university.
ASMSU Community Liaison and international relations senior Paddy La Torre said a dashboard system describing the city’s interactions with the university might not be effective because of a lack of student awareness about some aspects of the city.
“There are ways to get that information directly, which I think is more beneficial,” she said, citing the University Student Commission, an organization of student representatives to the council.
Although local schools were exempt from setting up a formal dashboard system under the law, East Lansing Public Schools has been working to implement a similar system to measure its performance, Superintendent David Chapin said.
The school district currently is working with the Ingham Intermediate School District to develop a collaborative process with multiple yearly screenings related to student performance in math and science through eighth grade, Chapin said.
“While we don’t have a formal dashboard. All of that data, … we’re looking at it longitudinally,” he said.
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