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Topeka unveils public GIS dashboards with district-level demographic and economic data
Summary
City GIS manager demonstrated a new public dashboard that provides councilmembers and residents district-level demographic, housing and business data drawn from federal and commercial sources. Councilmembers asked about local-data integration, update frequency and custom geographies.
City mapping and GIS manager Travis Lather demonstrated a public-facing suite of interactive dashboards at the Topeka City Council meeting on Oct. 7 that display demographic, economic and asset data down to council-district and neighborhood (NIA) levels.
The dashboards compile U.S. Census Bureau and American Community Survey estimates, Bureau of Labor Statistics and consumer-expenditure data, and commercial business-location data from Esri, Infogroup and SafeGraph. Lather said the city pays an annual vendor fee for access to the data and that the dashboards currently pull from those cloud-hosted data sources.
The presentation showed citywide and district-level views of metrics such as population by generation, high-school graduation rates, per-capita income, housing trends, and counts of local facilities such as libraries and health-care entities. Lather highlighted a “baselining” feature that lets users compare a district’s metrics to Shawnee County and national averages. He demonstrated how switching the geography selector updates the maps and statistics instantly and noted the dashboards are publicly accessible from the city website.
Councilmembers asked several technical and policy questions. Deputy Mayor said the system “does not incorporate any of our own data” and that the datasets live in the cloud, limiting the city’s ability to modify them on-premises. Lather replied that staff can add custom geographies — for example, councilmembers’ drawn boundaries or school attendance zones — by digitizing those polygons and refreshing the dataset.
Councilwoman Ortiz asked whether streets and park layers could be searchable; Lather said staff would add a street-search option and work with members individually to refine district-level boundaries. Councilman Miller asked about update frequency; Lather said the dashboards query the vendor cloud whenever a user opens a page and that a “last update” timestamp appears on the interface.
Lather cautioned that some crowd-sourced business listings (notably restaurants) can include outdated entries and that the city is most confident in census- and labor-statistics items. He offered to meet individually with councilmembers to add custom boundaries or additional local data.
The presentation concluded with staff noting the dashboards provide five primary pages of analysis per geography (population, housing, economic profile, at-risk populations and market-entity inventories) and that they are intended to help officials, staff and the public ‘‘tell stories’’ about each district’s conditions.
