All posts by Zachary

Participatory Culture, Politics

WL Second Class City Redistricting Map – Variation 1 – Dietrich

Councilor Dietrich presented his proposal for redistricting if and when we move to a Class 2 City at the August 4th City Council meeting.

Redistricting Map-Dietrich-2014-08

According to an e-mail from Councilor Dietrich, the source of population data and breakdown of districts are as follows:

Here are the numbers for the draft re-districting map I submitted based on the numbers I was given by BF&S.

Total 41,434 / 6 districts = 6905 (mean)

  • District 1 (blue ) 6850 -55 from mean
  • District 2 (red ) 6989 + 84 from mean
  • District 3 (yellow) 6835 -70 from mean
  • District 4 (grey ) 6938 +33 from mean
  • District 5 (pink ) 6923 + 18 from mean
  • District 6 (orange ) 6899 -06 from mean

TOTAL 41434

At the meeting, I asked and encouraged citizen and councilor involvement in the process of redistricting for our great City.  No definitive answer was given as to future workshops.

Education, Participatory Culture, Politics

Tippecanoe County Board of Zoning Appeals Updated Letter Rules

I learned from some other citizens that attended the West Lafayette City Council meeting last night, that several months ago (December 2013), the Tippecanoe County BZA updated its by-laws regarding written communication.

From that meeting:

Sallie Fahey said the Board requested that she and Jay Seeger write  a proposal for a By-law amendment related to letters read at public hearing. The Board was concerned about letters that when read are over the 5 minutes allowed for speakers at the hearing, letters that show up late in the afternoon or at the meeting, and what happens at subsequent meetings if a letter has already been read.

The board continued to discuss the changes and settled on amending their by-laws:

Letters and written communications mailed, hand delivered, faxed or emailed to the Office of the Board in advance of the hearing are intended for persons unable to attend the hearing themselves.

For letters to qualify to be entered into the record they must be:
1) signed regardless of delivery method
2) include the signer’s address
3) received no later than noon on the day of the hearing and
4) be no longer than two pages, 11 point font size, double spaced with 1” margins.

Letters sent to the office of the Board that qualify to be entered in the record will be read by staff, and once received the letter shall not be withdrawn. Once a letter is read at a meeting, it is a part of the record.

The writer is not permitted to speak or submit another letter even at a subsequent meeting resulting from either an inconclusive vote or a continuance, having originally chosen to submit a letter.

Should the author be present at the meeting he will not be permitted to speak, having elected instead to present his views in writing. This rule shall apply to any written material on which four or fewer signatures appear, or any petition of more than 300 words filed by the noon deadline. Any petition presented after the deadline or during the hearing shall not be read into the record by staff, but may be passed to the members.

You can read through the December 4th, 2013 minutes for all of the dialogue surrounding the change.

Be mindful when you write the BZA.  I would hate for your letter not to get in the record because it didn’t have the right margins.

Education, Politics, Presentations

Data Visualization for West Lafayette 2015 City Budget

(You can also access the full page for the City of West Lafayette 2015 Preliminary Budget with information from 2014-08-04.)

Tomorrow’s August City Council meeting will include Ordinance No. 25-14,  An Ordinance Setting The 2015 City Budget And Setting The 2015 Tax Levy On Property And Tax Rate.

This data is usually contained within a database and exported as a table.  The budget forms are online in this format on the City’s web site.

WL-Budget-PDF-2014-08-03

As we know, looking at tables doesn’t always provide the clearest picture.

Over the past several months, I have been learning more and more about various civic hacking projects around the globe.  One that I found incredibly exciting was Open Budget Oakland.

I thought they used their own software, created under the Code for America group, however, upon further investigation, I learned that their lovely tree map visualizations were provided by OpenSpending.

With this recent budget announcement, I decided to get the City’s data online and accessible in this format.  Sadly, the only data that is on the City’s web site is in PDF form.  Upon doing some more research, I learned about an amazing piece of FLOSS called Tabula. As their web site states, Tabula is a tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files.  And liberate it did.

Tabula-2014-08-03 ScreenshotAfter exporting the data from Tabula, I made a few corrections (column headers contained extra spaces which caused problems in OpenSpending) and we were all set to go.

The result is at the top of this post.

Sadly, there currently isn’t a way to backup the navigation on the tree map, but it appears that Open Budget Oakland has this worked out and we are in communication as to how they made that happen. In the meantime, please refresh your browser.

We plan on having a public dialogue about the budget process using these new data visualizations at the West Lafayette Public Library in the coming months. Please check back for more details.