12 December 2013

State of the City monitoring tool goes live

Is crime in Palmerston North dropping at a faster or slower rate than in the whole of the country?  Are more or fewer people in Palmerston North involved in the arts than elsewhere?

The answers to these and many other questions are now easily found in one location on Palmerston North City Council’s website through the State of the City Monitoring Tool.

Head of community planning, Andrew Boyle says the State of the City monitoring tool measures the City and the Council on numerous fronts including social, economic and environmental trends.

“It also includes commentary on how Council is progressing towards its goals including making Palmerston North a better place to live.”

The tool has two streams of data and viewers can easily move between them.

The first stream is How is the City Going? It is home to information about leisure, the built environment, economics and standards of living. Andrew says you can browse to find out key information about social, economic and environmental life in Palmerston North.

The other stream is What is the Council doing?  This stream organises the information by Council strategy – For example, Economic Well-Being, Active Recreation and Urban Design.  This stream includes summaries on what Council wants to achieve through these strategies (plus links to the full strategies).

The tool will be updated on an annual basis and Andrew says it should help residents, school children and community groups gain a better understanding of how our City and our Council are performing and the areas that we need to focus on.

Andrew says the information provided on the tool is really a précis which has been purposefully written to be easy to read, “It’s short and simple. It’s a snapshot on how we are performing rather than a detailed analysis.”

ENDS

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