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Santa Rosa, Calif., Rolls Out New Data Website

The city’s open data site assembles in one place information such as public employee salaries, crime reports, and building permit activity, and allows people to view it graphically via customizable maps, charts and graphs.

(Tribune News Service) -- Santa Rosa, Calif., has launched a new website designed to give residents greater access to data about their city government and the tools to help them make sense of it.

The city’s open data site assembles in one place information such as public employee salaries, crime reports, and building permit activity, and allows people to view it graphically via customizable maps, charts and graphs.

The initiative is part of Santa Rosa’s new focus on being more accessible and transparent to the public, a broader “open door” effort that includes the creation of a one-stop service hub and redesign of the city’s main website.

“Our old website was user-surly, but this one is user-friendly for sure,” Councilwoman Julie Combs said.

The idea has been under consideration for a couple years but picked up steam last fall when Sonoma County officials were getting close to picking a vendor for their open data platform, Eric McHenry, the city’s chief technology officer, told the council recently. The two organizations agreed to pick the same vendor to facilitate the sharing of data, and also to make it easier for residents, he said.

“We’re really excited about it,” McHenry said. “We really want this data to be available and to be responsive to our public.”

The city quietly launched the new site in January and has been gradually adding new data to it ever since.

It started with data sets McHenry said he thought the public would be most interested in. These include: crime information, fire department responses, employee salary and compensation data, public service requests made on the city’s mobile app MySantaRosa, budget data, building permit data, parks and recreational facilities, business tax data, and capital improvement projects.

Much of that information was spread out in various locations on the city’s homepage, www.srcity.org, but finding it was challenging, McHenry said. The new site is found at http://data.srcity.org.

In many cases, the data were available on the site but not in a reader friendly way, McHenry said. For example, the city’s budgets have long been available online, but they’re just electronic versions of documents that are hundreds of pages long. Similarly, other data, such as salary and benefit information, was available but often embedded in PDF formats, McHenry said.

But information on the new site is organized in databases that are downloadable, searchable and capable of being presented visually with easy-to-use software, he said.

“One of the basic tenets of open data platforms is everything that is up there, you can pull it down, you can massage it, twist it around and visualize it,” McHenry told the council.

A mapping function allows large sets of data to be displayed visually using heat maps that show where certain activities like crimes or building permits are concentrated over time.

At the moment, however, there are limitations to the data and its presentation.

For one, the only crime data available on the site presently appears to be from a few days in January. In addition, the details of the police responses are very limited. For example, mousing over one of the dots on the crime report map near the intersection of Fourth Street and Pacific Avenue reveals “Drug/Narcotic Offense” at 2:27 a.m. on Jan. 25, but does not give a precise location or any additional information.

Similarly, the locations of the nearly 21,000 fire and medical calls performed by the fire department during 2014 and January of 2015 have the last two numbers of the addresses obscured. So the Nov. 21 fire that displaced the residents of a 100-year-old home on Orchard Street, lists the call simply as “Fire, 12:37 p.m. 8xx Orchard Street.”

Such details were intentionally obscured. In both cases, the departments provided the data in “abstracted” form for privacy concerns, McHenry said. It’s one thing to report the general areas of public safety responses, but specifying exact addresses raises concerns about identifying the people who call for emergency services, he said.

“City staff is always concerned about respecting the privacy of the public,” he said.

Another limitation is that not all the data are categorized in a way that creates accurate geographical presentations. For example, a bubble map that purports to show where the capital improvement projects in this year’s budget are located shows a huge circle over City Hall.

That gives the inaccurate impression of a massive investment in downtown. Upon closer inspection, many of the projects lumped together in the downtown blob are for citywide projects, such as $900,000 budgeted for pedestrian improvements throughout the city and $600,000 for replacing streetlights with LED bulbs. Others are simply not coded for the correct location, such as $4 million budgeted for structural upgrades to the city’s Laguna Treatment Plant southwest of the city and $233,000 for work on the fire training center on West College Avenue.

Similarly, some data without further analysis or explanation could lead to mistaken conclusions.

The salary and benefits data, for example, shows the police chief in 2013 with a salary of $288,349. That’s $58,000 higher than the city manager at the time, who made $230,628.

But the reality is more complicated. That year’s salary was inflated by the retirement of Tom Schwedhelm, who boosted his $192,408 salary by $121,681 when he cashed out his accrued vacation and sick time following a 31-year career with the department.

His actual total pay in 2013 was $318,664. That figure is higher than the $288,349 reported to the state because the controllers’ office reports Medicare wages, which is a person’s salary minus certain deductions, explained Lisa Keeton, the city’s payroll manager.

McHenry acknowledged there is risk that releasing so much raw data without explanation can cause misunderstandings. But attempting to explain the data can create its own problems, including giving the impression it’s being “massaged” by the city. Analysis could also be too labor-intensive to be worthwhile.

“If we were to go into the salary data and try to annotate and explain some of the odd-looking data, it would require a deep inspection, analysis, comments and review by city staff,” McHenry said.

So at the moment the city is erring on the side of presenting the data and letting the public come to its own conclusions, he said.

The cost of the program is modest, requiring a limited amount of staff time and about $12,000 in software fees annually, perhaps growing to $24,000 as the program adds new data sets.

In time, the city expects to be able to link up its data with the county’s portal, which goes live next month, and other cities if they choose to participate, McHenry said. That could prove particularly useful for services that span jurisdictions, such as regional transit networks, he said.

Council members have been supportive of the effort. Combs said she’s received positive feedback from neighborhood groups, which particularly appreciate greater access to public safety data.

©2015 The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC