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West Chester Borough, university form working group to tackle housing, quality-of-life and safety
Summary
Council members said a standing working group of borough leaders and West Chester University officials is meeting to address housing, quality of life, infrastructure, financial partnerships and communication; council discussed using university students for data analysis to support public safety agencies.
Councilmembers and borough leadership described an ongoing working group with West Chester University aimed at public-safety and quality-of-life issues. The group includes the Public Safety Committee chair, the council vice president, the council president, the mayor and university leadership, councilmember Sean said.
"We agreed that this would remain kind of a standing, order of new of old business on public safety," Councilmember Sean said, explaining the group is developing a matrix of issues and short- and midterm goals covering housing, quality of life, infrastructure, financial partnerships and communication.
Councilmember Metrick proposed creating a recurring student support arrangement — such as internships or a regular analyst — to provide data analytics capacity for the borough and public-safety partners. "Maybe there's some... student support to the [borough] on a regular basis, whether it's for data analytics to figure out how we can do better... and everybody could win," Metrick said. Other council members agreed the university has resources that could help analyze the fire, EMS and police call trends discussed earlier in the meeting.
Why it matters: coordinated town–gown engagement could provide analytical capacity to identify hotspots and target interventions without placing the full analytic burden on volunteer agencies.
Ending: The working group circulated an issues matrix to the Public Safety Committee and sought additional council and public input; no formal action or funding decision was recorded in the transcript.
