JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The city’s brand-new data portal is one of the latest casualties of the council finance committee’s budget cuts.
It was less than two weeks ago that Mayor Donna Deegan unveiled the “State of Jax” website.
The site allows users to compare things like education level, life expectancy, and much more down to the neighborhood level, and compare those data points to the rest of the county, the state, or even the nation.
Deegan pitched it as a way to help better target funding and policies to help the areas with the most need.
“This is what smart, accountable governments should all be doing,” said Deegan during the August 5th press conference announcing the new website.
But Councilmember Rory Diamond (R-District 13) pulled the plug on the $237,000 intended to pay for the website.
He argued the data comparison tool is essentially cloaked diversity, equity, and inclusion, in part because the initiative was led by the mayor’s former Director of Diversity and Inclusion, who now serves as her Chief of Analytics.
“The purpose is to go ahead and spend more money on people they like and less on people they don’t like and use this dashboard as like the alleged proof of that,” Diamond said.
Councilmember Matt Carlucci (R-Group 4 At-Large), on the other hand, didn’t mince words when asked what he thought of Diamond’s characterization of the website.
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“That’s just political garbage rhetoric,” said Carlucci.
Carlucci argued that council members who don’t see value in the data offered on the website aren’t thinking about it hard enough.
“This is real important information. And once you have that, the city can start directing services and dollars to those areas to try to shore them up. And that lifts up the whole city and begins to enhance, again, the quality of life,” Carlucci said.
Beyond the DEI debate, Diamond argued that much of the data on the State of Jax site can already be found on the Nonprofit Center of Northeast Florida’s Catalyst webpage.
“With the exact same vendor. We’re already paying for it. There’s no reason to do it twice,” said Diamond.
Carlucci said he’s hopeful funding for the State of Jax website will be added back to the budget when it goes before the full council.
It’s not clear how many votes it would have, but even on the finance committee, there was disagreement between Republican members on whether to cut it.
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