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Delmarva Index presenter shows Kent County dashboards and finds local business sentiment weakened
Summary
Aaron Silva of Eastern Shore GIS reviewed Delmarva Index tools, including a business sentiment survey, resiliency toolkit and tax- and tourism-focused dashboards that staff said the county can use for planning; Kent County had 26 survey respondents and several datasets are behind a log-in for confidentiality.
Aaron Silva, GISP and project manager for Eastern Shore GIS’s Delmarva Index, presented the Delmarva Index’s Kent County data and interactive dashboards at the Kent County Economic Development Commission meeting. Silva said the site’s resources — the business sentiment survey, the Eastern Shore Economic Resiliency Toolkit, sales-and-use tax dashboards and a tourism dashboard — are available on delmarvaindex.org and that a redesigned website is coming in the next few months.
The presentation focused on the winter business sentiment survey and several county-level dashboards. Silva said the survey was conducted primarily in January and that Kent County accounted for 26 respondents, which he said represented roughly 16–17% of responses in the most recent wave. He summarized key findings shown in the county dashboard: 39% of respondents said business conditions in their county would improve over the coming 12 months (a decline from an earlier survey), sector-level sentiment trended downward overall, and 27% of respondents in the February 2025 wave reported feeling worse about business conditions in the year ahead.
Silva demonstrated how to drill into responses by company size, industry and geography, and he showed visualizations that flag top barriers to starting or expanding a business in Kent County — finances and funding, inflation and regulation — and sector-level impacts such as insurance, fuel, rent and payroll costs. He also explained the resiliency toolkit, which was developed with EDA funds, and the tourism dashboard’s use of Maryland Comptroller sales-and-use tax data adjusted by tourism “factors” assigned to categories such as hotels and auto rentals.
Silva pointed listeners to specific datasets usable for economic development work: the Maryland tax revenue dashboards (which use Comptroller data), a tourism dashboard with tourism-attributable adjustments, a Maryland manufacturing industry dashboard, and a transferable-skills dashboard that links occupations and projected employment. He noted the most recent fiscal-year tax data available on the dashboards was FY2023 and that the county-level tax dashboard showed total revenue for all industries for Kent County in 2023 at about $346,000,000 (as displayed in the tool), and that the team hoped to add 2024 Comptroller data soon.
Staff and commissioners asked for follow-up access. Silva said some dashboard panels are behind password-protected dashboards because small cell sizes can risk respondent confidentiality; he offered to provide login credentials for county staff. He also suggested commissioners contact him or staff for one-on-one walkthroughs to use the tools for planning and to combine the subjective business-sentiment data with objective fiscal indicators.
The commission did not take formal action on Silva’s presentation; staff said they will share the story map and consider additional one-on-one tutorials for commissioners and county staff.
