Program designed to help cities use statistics to make better decisions

Numbers don't lie, and they also guide. Bloomberg Philanthropies will help Las Vegas better use data as part of the What Works Cities initiative.

What Works Cities, a $42 million program hatched and funded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, aims to help cities use statistics to make better decisions, improve services and engage residents.

The program, which added Las Vegas last week, started in April and so far includes 21 cities with populations of 100,000 to 1 million. Although the Las Vegas Valley includes more than 2 million residents, the program applies only to Las Vegas, What Works Cities spokeswoman Sharman Stein said.

What Works Cities aims to include more than 100 cities by Dec. 31, 2017, she said. In a statement, the program said its current group of selected cities represents more than 8 million Americans and has annual combined budgets exceeding $31 billion.

Las Vegas applied to the program in the latter half of this year, city spokesman David Riggleman said.

What Works Cities will give Las Vegas and the other cities free access to experts from Results for America and The Sunlight Foundation, both data-analysis groups; the Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University and the Government Performance Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School, both research centers; and the Behavioral Insights Team, a United Kingdom agency with offices in New York and Sydney that redesigns public services and draws on ideas from behavioral science literature.

"Cities have enormous amounts of information: where people live, what transportation they use, how much energy they use, what schools they attend, how much they pay in taxes," Stein said. "If you don't have data sets or if you have them and they're not organized ... or you're not analyzing that data, you're just missing out on opportunities to address or solve whatever the city's challenges are."

In a statement, Las Vegas officials said What Works Cities will enable them to make more city data available to the public; reduce performance management measures to the most critical ones; develop interactive and external dashboards for managerial decision making; and develop standards for peer-to-peer comparisons with other cities.

Riggleman said reducing the number of performance management measures, which now exceeds 500, particularly matters.

"We want Bloomberg Philanthropies to help us winnow them down to the most critical things we need to be doing," he said. "We can tap the expertise of these people, and they can tell us whether we're being effective.

"This is a great opportunity for the city to tap a lot of expertise without having to spend a lot of money to do it," he added.

Riggleman said the city hopes to benefit from What Works Cities as it did from Code for America, another nonprofit initiative. A trio of Code for America fellows helped the city's information technology department create Development FastPass, an online tool that combines parcel use data, land use, zoning, building occupancy and business incentives to help business owners research where to put their operations in Las Vegas.

What Works Cities' most recently added cities include Denver; San Francisco; San Jose, Calif.; Bellevue and Tacoma, Wash.; Denton and Waco, Texas; Cambridge, Mass.; Lexington, Ky.; St. Paul, Minn.; Independence, Mo.; and Anchorage, Alaska.

The first group, added in August, included Seattle; New Orleans; Mesa, Ariz,; Kansas City, Mo.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; Jackson, Miss.; Louisville, Ky.; and Tulsa, Okla.

— Follow Matthew Crowley on Twitter @copyjockey.