Austin, TX- Who’s prospering and who’s not? Who’s healthy and who’s not? Who’s stuck in the car, in bad air, trapped in sprawl, without a job?

New findings by a group dedicated to collecting unbiased – and sometimes hard to find – data about the Austin-San Marcos metropolitan area of Bastrop, Caldwell, Hays, Travis and Williamson counties show the five counties tied together in many ways, but with sharp differences in how certain communities are faring within the region.

“This is the only study that looks at the region as a whole, then offers comparisons within the region, and with other parts of the country, to create indicators of how we’re doing socially, economically, and on the environment,” says Fred Butler, the chairman of the group and an Austin community leader. “It’s a holistic approach, as opposed to a single-issue, or even a set of issues, approach.”

The findings are being released this week in the 2002 report of the Central Texas Sustainability Indicators Project, which provides charts, maps, graphs and data on 40 indicators of community health, ranging from child care availability to regional entrepreneurship, from water quality and health insurance coverage to affordable housing, and “neighborliness.”

Full reports are free and now available on-line at www.centex-indicators.org, and are being distributed in bound, color hard copies to public libraries throughout the region. Elected officials, local governments and selected community organizations are receiving individual copies.

“It’s a road map,” says the vice chair of the group that produces the report, Jeff Barton of Hays County. “It’s not meant to tell anybody where they’ve got to go, but where we all are today, where we came from, how we stand in relation to one another, how far it is to the nearest mile markers.”

The full name of the group is a mouthful — The Central Texas Sustainability Indicators Project: Indicators for Hays, Travis, Williamson, Caldwell and Bastrop counties. The project is governed by an executive committee plus an advisory board composed of community leaders and experts drawn from a wide variety of business professions and public interest groups representing communities across the metro area. A key strategic partner is Austin Community College, which provides a home base and helps support the project’s executive director, Jim Walker.

Walker notes that it’s a particularly interesting time to be looking at regional trends because the Census 2000 data now being released is such a rich vein of information. “The Indicators Project and the growing wealth of census reports complement one another,” says Walker. “We find good information there ourselves. But our project also goes much broader, and illuminates the finer annual trend lines within the decade-long trends.”

The project, which is now five years old, released its first report in 2000. “The thinking of the founders was to provide a common frame of reference, a common language for putting important issues – even points of conflict – into context,” says chairman Butler. “The numbers don’t mean so much in isolation, so everyone knew the report would get more and more interesting as the project progressed and we accumulated more annual benchmarks to compare.”

Included with this year’s report is a group of findings that sample some of the more interesting tidbits found in the full report. The findings are attached.

Project organizers say they hope the report and its findings are a starting point for discussion and debate “using a common language” of information and measurements, and focusing on the inter-relatedness of what they call the “three E’s” needed for healthy, sustainable community life: economy, environment and equity. “This isn’t an end-point; it’s an on-going project, and each year’s report should be a spark,” says Barton.

Call Jim Walker, 223-7774, for more information, or to request copies of the report.

Findings from 2002 Annual Report

“Connection is a theme here. We have seen the community often divide into camps over three broad categories of issues. But we don’t believe the best way to look at our community is through any one prism – environmental, economic, or class and equity.

Like our community itself, the seemingly disparate issues most of us care passionately about are bound one to the other, if we will only notice. Only by considering these pieces as parts in a single fabric will we get good indicators of how we are doing, or whether our course is sustainable.”

– excerpted from the 2002 Report, Message to the Central Texas Community

This and prior SIP reports do not attempt to interpret for the community what our indicators are telling us. In our current environment, there is an ever increasing call and need for this to happen. The SIP Executive Committee, prior to the release of the next annual report, will construct a methodology, which will attempt to use the indicator data to assess the sustainability of our region.

EQUITY

There is a persistent inequity in the distribution and access to resources across the region. Trends in academic performance, participation in elected leadership positions, access to home loan capital, access to parkland, among others, reveal long-term disparities. The data show this inequity exists not only across race and ethnicity, but also geographically and whether or not someone lives in an urban or rural area.

v Access to home loan capital among racial/ethnic groups is becoming more equitable, but blacks and Hispanics continue to be 30 to 50 percent less likely to be approved for a loan.

v Voter turnout remains low, and, as the map new to this report shows, is especially low in less affluent districts.

v Even though we are a highly educated, communicative and technologically sophisticated region, many of our neighbors are not proficient in English, which may affect their access to the region’s resources.

The public school experience continues to be markedly different depending upon one’s race/ethnicity. African-Americans and Hispanics are up to 6 times less likely to attend exemplary schools than other groups. Similarly, African-Americans and Hispanics are up to 10 times more likely to drop out of high school.

ECONOMY

A significant number of central Texans continue to live without health insurance. In addition, recent layoffs and increases in the cost of health services have increased the number of people living without adequate health coverage.

A high concentration of jobs in a small number of industry sectors exacerbated the negative impact of the recent economic downturn. The slump in the high-tech sector is well documented: exporting industries lost some six thousand jobs in software, semiconductors, and computers/peripherals. Correspondingly, unemployment rose sharply and the available labor force grew. The employer diversity indicator shows that the job losses were concentrated in the area’s largest high-tech firms. However, innovation and entrepreneurship in Central Texas appear to remain strong.

While housing is readily available in Central Texas, affordable housing is not available equally across the region. Many factors contribute to affordability, such as commute times, employment, access to childcare, and desirability of a school district commonly based on academic performance.

ENVIRONMENT

Several environmental indicators show total consumption of resources is growing, as is our Central Texas population. Some per capita measures also are holding steady or showing increases including solid waste sent to landfills and daily vehicle miles traveled. These would indicate a trend toward increased total consumption beyond that attributable to population growth alone.

Water consumption per capita appears fairly stable across the region, but population growth will drive demands for new supplies. The region’s lakes, river, and streams also face pollution pressures. Fewer than half of the monitored water bodies in Central Texas meet all state water quality standards. Despite the high degree of regional interest in water quality, only a few key waters (such as Austin’s Barton Creek and Barton Springs, and portions of the Colorado River) are closely and regularly studied.

More and better data are needed for many environmental indicators, such as changes in the density of growth, water quality for all significant streams and watersheds in the region, and energy consumption.