Within recent years, Mayor Fischer has made it an objective of Louisville (KY) Metro to become a more compassionate and equitable place to live. In fact, that pledge actually goes back as early as at least 2011. Since then, the city has taken significant steps towards becoming a more compassionate place to live.

As the city continues to grow as an equitable organization, I wondered how representative the staff of Louisville Metro was. Not just representative along gender or racial lines, which are often topic of conversation, but representative of the areas and communities that compose the city. These local communities have differences emerge between socio-economic status, gender, race, and health outcomes.

The following analysis uses publicly available open data to see how communities are represented in our local government staff.

Jefferson County

Public data shows that Metro employs 4,175 individuals. Results from a simple filter for zip codes in Jefferson County are shown below in Table 1. 77.5% of Metro employees live within the city/county. A surprising (to me) 22.5% of Metro employees live outside of Jefferson County. That’s 1 in 5 individuals living outside the county that they work in local government for. Figure 1 shows a map of all of the employee locations.

Table 1- Employee Location by County

Figure 1- Employee Location (All Metro)

Given the location of Louisville, creating a hard limit around Jefferson County may not be comprehensive enough because it leaves out Southern Indiana. Table 2 shows the breakdown for Southern Indiana. The percent shown for employees outside of Jefferson County and Southern Indiana now reflects less than 1 in 5, although not much less. Figure 2 presents a map of those living across the Ohio River.

Table 2- Employee Location outside of Jefferson County

Figure 2- Employee Location for Southern Indiana

By Department

Based on the data available, I pulled a sample of departments and looked at where their current employees lived based upon zip code. No further information was used besides employee count and zip code. (Outliers may not be visualized below.)

Mayor’s Staff

Beginning with the Mayor’s Office seemed to be the most natural way to begin. This executive office showed a total of 12 employees according to the data posted online.

Figure 3- Employee location: Mayor’s Staff

Develop Louisville

Develop Louisville focuses on the full range of land development activities, including planning and design, vacant property initiatives, advanced planning, housing & community development programs, permits and licensing, land acquisition, public art and clean and green sustainable development partnerships.

Develop Louisville showed 71 employees connected to the department. Several large concentrations appear on the map below.

Figure 4- Employee location: Develop Louisville

Resilience & Community Services

The Mission of the Office of Resilience and Community Services is “to fight poverty and promote compassion, stability, and the empowerment of residents and communities.”

RCS showed a total of 84 individuals employed with the department. As you can see below, those employees were spread out across many areas of the city.

Figure 5- Employee location: Community Services

Louisville Metro Police Department

It is the mission of the Louisville Metro Police Department to deliver professional,

effective services, fairly and ethically, at all times, to all people, in order to prevent crime, control crime and enhance the overall quality of life for citizens and visitors.

I was particularly interested in LMPD given the size and nature of the department’s work. The data showed 1184 employees currently associated with the organization. For the sake of clarity, this map was zoomed-in, with singular data points in extended zip codes not being reflected.

Figure 6- Employee location: LMPD

County Attorney

The Jefferson County Attorney is the legal counsel for the Louisville/Jefferson County Metro Government. This office has the authority to take legal action to protect the interests of the people of Metro Louisville and their government. This includes both civil and criminal divisions.

The County Attorney, responsible for the legal action in the county, showed 63 employees employed with the organization. You can see several concentration emerge in the below map.

Figure 7- Employee location: County Attorney

Human Relations Commission

The Louisville Metro Human Relations Commission seeks to bridge the many ethnic, racial, and religious groups in Louisville Metro through a combination of civil law enforcement and education & outreach.​

Based on the description, one could expect that the HRC is a fairly diverse organization. Below you can see the concentrations for the 12 employees working in the organization.

Figure 8- Employee location: Human Relations Commission

Other Interesting Facts

There was roughly a three way tie for longest distance:

2.5 hours (North of Russelville- EMA) 2 hours (Cincinatti- Animal Services) 2 hours (Cincinatti- LMPD)

Summary

1 in 5 Metro employees live outside of Jefferson County

3.7% of Metro employees live in Southern Indiana

The take-aways from the departmental maps may differ for each person reading. What is clear, however, is that several large clusters typically emerge among staff in each department.

It is refreshing to see an even spread emerge among several departments.

While this information will not fully inform us on perspectives of a department, it provides a layer of information that can help us reflect and ensure everyone’s voices are being heard. This is especially relevant as we continue to grow as a compassionate and equitable city.

Future projects could improve upon this work by controlling for department size when examining spread of the department.

Data Source

All of the data used was pulled from the Louisville Open Data website.

Data was analyzed using Power BI Bing Maps visualization.

Disclosure

Jeremy Gibson is employed with Louisville Metro Government, Public Works Department.