Fun with spreadsheets (wait, read on!)

The following was posted by The View Staff Reporter Jerry LaVaute:

Fun with Spreadsheets

I’m currently working on three different Excel spreadsheets, and a fourth one was published today, a summary of the qualifications for the four remaining candidates for Public Safety Director in Van Buren Township.

They’re tricky, getting the look just right in the news, either online or in the newspaper. I haven’t seen the newspaper yet today, but I looked at it online and was reasonably happy.

Data properly arrayed on a spreadsheet is like a kaleidoscope – every time you look, you see something different, and it sometimes is fascinating.

And to get the data, you need help. So I get to mine for data using the subject matter experts in the communities in which I work.

This week and last, I worked with the Finance Director in Sumpter Township, its police chief, fire chiefs in the city of Belleville and Van Buren and Sumpter Township, the treasurer and deputy treasurer in Van Buren Township, the Van Buren Township Supervisor and the Deputy Clerk, and a few other officials in these communities.

As the Professional Golfers Association blurb goes, “These guys are good.”

It’s great fun to gather the data with their help, to try to make sense of it initially, to return to them to validate the data and so validate my conclusions, and to publish the results to a reading audience hungry for facts, expressed in a simple, helpful manner.

Past spreadsheets of mine have compared police compensation in four communities, and another was a detailed explanation of the “blended rate” used to pay police officers who double as firefighters in Van Buren Township.

For the former spreadsheet and the story that accompanied it, I won an investigative journalism award. Very cool.

Next up is a comparison of firefighting staffing in Belleville and Sumpter and Van Buren Townships, and a look at water and sewer rates in what we call the tri-community.