The Martha’s Vineyard Commission plans to revive its tradition of issuing annual data reports for the Island, beginning this fall with the first report in 16 years.
Commission executive director Adam Turner, who spearheaded the efforts last year, said the reports will help inform both the public and the MVC with insights into a wide range of Island trends.
Mr. Turner will present data from this year’s report at a meeting of the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber of Commerce at 4 p.m. Wednesday at the Harbor View Hotel.
The report aims to provide a central data source, shedding light on Island demographics, building and occupancy trends, school enrollment, employment, income, transportation, land use changes and other aspects of Island life.
“It puts all our decisions in context,” Mr. Turner said. “We have an idea of the economic trends, we have an idea of the infrastructure, we have an idea of the natural environment. We make our decisions based on the Island trends, and this is ground zero for that.”
Mr. Turner began collecting data shortly after arriving on the job last year, and noted a six-month planning process to compile this year’s report, which draws many sources, including the U.S. Census, the state Department of Labor, annual town reports, and local agencies including the Steamship Authority and Martha’s Vineyard Airport.
The last MVC data report was issued in 2000, although periodic updates continued until around 2006, and data spreadsheets have remained available to the public.
“The thinking was that with the availability of the net and the web, the data report becomes stale very quickly,” said MVC senior planner Bill Veno, who was not involved in the efforts this year, but has worked for the commission since 1999. He said the assumption that people could simply access the data online turned out to be false. “It’s harder to find where you had to go to get the information,” he said.
Looking ahead, Mr. Turner hopes to sharpen the focus on environmental issues such as food waste and landfills, and some of the more shadowy aspects of the Island economy. “I’d like to get much more into those kinds of things, into understanding the economy here, doing reports on leakage, seasonal stuff,” he said. Leakage refers to the diversion of funds from the economy. “Some of the data is under the radar and you’ve really got to design and compile that in a strategic way, and we haven’t done that yet.”
At their meeting last week, commission members discussed some of the challenges of monitoring the Island’s so-called cash economy, which may shed light on issues of affordability and statistics related to the area median income. (The U.S. Census calculates a median income of $65,433 for a family in Dukes County.)
Commissioner Clarence A. (Trip) Barnes 3rd pointed out at the meeting that many Islanders have work they do on the side. “I don’t think there is any way that you could really put a number on it,” he said. “The person who gives you a check for five hundred bucks, unless he’s audited it’s never going to show up anyhow. But it’s a big number.”
Mr. Turner plans to develop a strategy to include information on the cash economy in next year’s report, or at least get a better sense of it through surveys. He plans to issue this year’s report — both online and in print — shortly after the presentation on Wednesday.
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