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A new application available through the Division of Local Services website seeks to address the need of municipal officials and other interested parties to access, sort and compare a wide variety of data through a single mechanism.
Previously unavailable anywhere in state government, the Community Comparison Report tool serves as a clearinghouse of available information that’s reported to DLS. It is expected to streamline the way information is searched and how it’s compared.
The new application will give local officials and others the ability to create customized community comparison reports directly from the DLS website (www.mass.gov/dls).
“We frequently put together analyses comparing our town with neighboring or similar communities,” said Stow Town Administrator Bill Wrigley, “so access to a Web-based reporting tool where you can fine-tune your search and query data directly from the DLS database will save us a considerable amount of time and effort.”
Developed by Lisa Juszkiewicz and Mike Briggs of the Municipal Databank, the application is an easy-to-use means of extracting comparative municipal finance and demographic data for multiple communities. Unlike previous sources, the application draws data by direct query of the information that resides in DLS’s Gateway system. As a result, users will have ready access to the most current data available.
Users can quickly collect and view data for any number of cities and towns they select or regard as peer communities. These selections can be based on traditional peer communities, proximity, or county boundaries, or the search can be narrowed by selecting minimum and maximum data ranges for certain criteria. For example, a search can identify all communities with a population between 10,000 and 20,000 and with an annual budget between $30 million and $50 million.
Other available criteria include average single-family tax bill, EQV per capita, and DOR income per capita. The user can set data ranges in one or all criteria.
The Community Comparison application automatically extracts extensive pre-selected information for each city and town identified by the search. According to the DLS, the application eliminates the often-frustrating exercise of opening numerous spreadsheets and sorting, cutting and pasting data from each into a single spreadsheet.
The report’s 65-plus data elements include data on assessed valuations, levies and tax rates by class, revenues by source, actual spending, receivables, reserves, debt levels and bond ratings.
After the report is generated, the user can export it to Excel with the click of a button. There, it can be refined, sorted and analyzed, or the information can be displayed in charts or graphs and pasted into documents or other spreadsheets for presentation.
The Community Comparison application can be valuable tool for identifying peer communities, measuring performance, and establishing benchmarks.
For the DLS, the ability to directly query Gateway data will eliminate regular, labor-intensive updates to static Excel spreadsheets. The DLS hopes to use the underlying community comparison programming as a foundation to produce additional Web-based data reporting tools for the benefit of internal and external customers.
Questions or comments can be sent to the Municipal Databank at databank@dor.state.ma.us.