Weekly Update

Friends,

Last week in this space, we shared how we’re reinvesting in our city through our libraries. Hours are longer and participation has grown.

Today, we’re telling a similar story — this time, about our community centers.

This month, we expanded hours at all 24 of our community centers all across Memphis. They’re now open until 8 p.m. on weekdays, and a full day on Saturdays. Already, we’re able to expand our programming with the addition of a flag football league.

In total, that means 280 new hours of community center time per week.

Credit Maria Munoz-Blanco and her staff at our Division of Parks & Neighborhoods. They were able to make this happen by finding efficiencies elsewhere, meaning that no new tax dollars are being spent.

It’s another example of how running a more efficient City of Memphis government means more benefit to our citizens — and another example of how we’re reinvesting in our neighborhoods and our young people.

Time for data: Our monthly performance meeting was this week, and you can review how we’re doing by looking over all of the slides here.

I wanted to highlight a couple of them, though. Here’s the average 911 answer time, which in August set a new record of 8.85 seconds.

You may remember that number was 59.7 seconds when we took office.

And here’s the save rate at Memphis Animal Services — essentially, how many animals that come into the shelter that are released to adopters or rescue groups.

Many of you tell me just how much you like our transparency in sharing these slides. (If you follow me on Twitter, you saw more yesterday.) We want to take our transparency to a new level, though.

So this week, we opened up a draft of a new City of Memphis open data policy. Through the end of October, we're asking for your feedback on how to make it better. You can do that here.

When I ran for mayor, I promised to measure results, hold city government accountable, and share those results with you. We’ve been doing that, and now we want to do more.

A vision for transit: Memphis 3.0 and Innovate Memphis, in partnership with MATA, launched a Transit Vision process this week. In short, it’s an opportunity to rethink what our city needs in terms of effective bus transit. The Memphis Daily News has more on it here, and we encourage you to take the survey.

Keep the asphalt coming: Everywhere I go, the No. 1 thing I hear is how much you love these weekly emails. No. 2? Street paving.

Thanks to channel 24 for highlighting how we’re getting more of that done — double from just four years ago. As always, you can check to see if your street is next by viewing our map.

Yours,