Alachua County reviews transportation focus of strategic guide, pilots public dashboard

Alachua County commissioners spent more than an hour on a department-level implementation plan for the county's recently adopted strategic guide, focusing on transportation measures and a pilot public dashboard.

Barbara Bradford, who identified herself as a Budget & Physical Services staff member, told the board the purpose was "to discuss the progress that we've made on the build out of the recently adopted Alachua County strategic guide" and to seek guidance on how language edits and departmental build-outs should be brought forward. She said a consultant, Keith Scott, helped develop the plan and will assist with department implementation.

The board agreed that routine name or scrivener edits should generally be handled at staff level or placed on the consent agenda, while changes that alter the plan's intent should come back as regular agenda items for fuller discussion. "If there's a change in wording that changes the meaning of the plan, then I would say that should be agenda," the Chair said in the exchange.

Much of the discussion centered on what to measure. Commissioners urged staff to prioritize metrics that are actionable and not unduly burdensome to departments. Suggestions included tracking costs by project type (maintenance versus repaving), the thoroughness and frequency of pothole repairs, park-and-ride utilization and ridership intensity for transit, and spatial dashboards to show whether investments reach underserved areas.

Bradford described a short pilot of a dashboard built in the ACHIEVE IT platform that pulls together point-in-time measures, GIS maps and linked reports. She said the pilot uses examples from Leon, St. Johns, Broward, Fulton and Mecklenburg counties and can show red/yellow/green status for measures and allow users to drill into underlying maps or PDFs. "This is a system we already have," Bradford said; the vendor plans a beta public rollout in coming weeks or months.

Commissioners pressed for two complementary public-facing components: a simple executive-summary landing page with the top five indicators for nontechnical users, and a deeper drill-down dashboard for planners and power users. Staff agreed and noted the system can surface source documents and external sites rather than duplicate content.

Bradford and commissioners set next steps: staff will bring department directors into focused implementation meetings to confirm measures that are feasible and useful, refine the dashboard widgets, and return with updated language and a consent-item bundle for routine edits. Bradford said the county aims to complete the remaining focus-area templates and incorporate the board's direction into budget processes, targeting completion of the rollout by September 30.

The presentation and discussion were informational; no substantive board action was taken during this meeting.