Guest Blog from Kim Raia

Each member of the Leadership Academy II is authoring a guest blog. This blog is from Kim Raia, an environmental consultant with CTAS.

When I first started working for CTAS 15 years ago comparative data was so hard to come by! Creating a database often required driving to a county office and hand recording local hard copy files. We spent a lot of time gathering both baseline data and programmatic data. While we still spend time collecting programmatic and comparative data, the baseline demographic information is much easier to come by.

One of the primary functions of our work is to help our customers make informed decisions. Often, we help them do this by showing comparisons between neighboring communities. That’s why it’s exciting we now have so many resources available for graphically exploring baseline data.

I’d like to highlight a couple of these tools.  First, I’d like to show our own CTAS Tennessee Population and Economic Data Portal, developed by Mike Meyers with help from UT CBER and UT Geography. This is a tool for exploring baseline data and it serves as a good start for the foundation of comparative reports. Here are a few quick maps and charts I was able to graph and map on the fly:

This table shows educational attainment across Tennessee. Darker blue counties have highest percentage of population with a bachelor’s degree. I could download a table with this information for each county or export the data and map as a PDF. I also can change the map colors and method for classifying (quantiles, equal intervals, natural breaks, etc.).

In this screen shot you can readily see which communities are doing the best in providing health care insurance. The blue highlighted counties have over 88 percent of residents insured in either public or private programs.

Conversely, here are the counties with the lowest percentage of health care coverage in Tennessee.

The Data Portal will also allow you to explore local or regional data. Here is a set of information on the 16 County East Tennessee Development District showing Census tracts with over 25 percent of population still working in manufacturing jobs.

Here is a screenshot showing Census tracts with a high percentage of grandparents responsible for raising grandchildren. If I were in elected office this information would be very valuable in directing limited resources and services in my district.

The data sets available in the Data Portal include information from the US Census, UT’s Center for Business and Economic Research, TACIR, and CTAS.  Take a look by following this link:

 http://ctasdata.utk.tennessee.edu/

The second resource is more useful if you live or are doing research in the Knoxville MSA. The ET Index is an assembly of economic and quality of life data for the eight county area surrounding Knoxville. The project came out of the work of PlanET, a Regional Partnership of East Tennessee Communities. ET Index uses 87 indicators to give a quick view of the overall health and status of the region.

The developers wanted to use easy to understand indicators covering broad areas of importance.  The regional dashboard considers education, transportation, neighborhoods, housing, the economy, the environment, and quality of life. For demonstration, by clicking on one of the indicators, “Annual Change in Jobs” I have displayed an overview of the metric (why it’s important) and the status of the metric (jobs in region --“Rising”).  A user can interactively plot a chart for export or can download data tables based on a filter.

Here I’ve graphed the Annual Change in Jobs for Tennessee, the East Tennessee Regional MSA and Blount County for comparison.

This graph comes from the Indicator on Financial Well-Being and shows the percent of children under 18 living in poverty. Between 2008-12 over 20 percent of the children in the region lived in poverty, compared with 25 percent statewide. Since 2000 this trend is not moving in a positive direction for any county.

This shows how 8^th graders are testing in mathematics over time.  I’ve selected comparisons between Anderson, Blount, Jefferson, Loudon, and Roane in this example.

I hope you have a chance to look at both of these resources. In the age of the Internet, there is no shortage of data, but filtering through data can be time consuming. These tools are very useful for quickly gathering baseline information about Tennessee at the state, region, county, or municipal level. We can help our customers and our communities by helping them make more informed decisions.