25 September 2019

AZ Big Media's BIG STORY Today: Mesa Ranked #19 For Best-Run Cities in 2019 WalletHub

“Mesa is ranked the 19th Best Run City in the country!” heralded Hizzoner Mesa Mayor John Giles blowing-his-own-trumpet on his Facebook page on hearing the news.

We work hard to be fiscally responsible and provide high-quality services and experiences for our residents.”


Please Note: For the study, WalletHub analyzed data from 150 most populated cities to find the best and worst across six categories:
> financial stability
> education
> health
> safety
> economy, and
> infrastructure and pollution.
 
Mesa ranked 19th overall

What about the other categories???

Just two quick results - scroll down for more

#22 in budget per capita, and # 55 in quality of city services.
In the other categories, it received the highest score for safety at No. 35.

(This WalletHub story posted on AZ BigMedia was originally published at Chamber Business News.)
_________________________________________________________________________
WalletHub is a personal finance website that was launched in early August 2013. 
It is based in Washington, D.C. and owned by Evolution Finance, Inc. – parent company of the credit card website CardHub.com.

Definitely not the best or most reliable source for rankings of cities
_________________________________________________________________________
REALITY CHECK Here's the link > MesaZona Blog July 2019
July 2019
Raving Mad-About-Mesa: Say Again #19 For What?
Mayor Jivin' John Giles was 'running-off at-the-mouth' the other day raving that  Mesa was one of the Best-Run Cities in America. Looks like the former track-star and ambulance chaser-accident law/personal injury attorney needs to pause.
He cherry-picked just one of six key categories -
Mesa ranks the next-to-last in the second tier of 20 cities in the Overall City Rank.
 
It ranks the Worst #1 for Pollution and Infrastructure,
 #72 for Financial Stability, and
#59 for Education.
Let's for the sake of disclosure, knock the mayor down-a-notch-or-two. In the interest of holding the mayor transparent and accountable or responsible for what he says, there's a few things to grab your attention to keep it fair and balanced: data.
Mayors - and city councils - come and go. They get elected for six-year or four-year terms. Some run-out their terms in office and some resign ahead-of-time for various reasons.
There is, however, one non-elected high-salaried city employee who is the city's Chief Executive Officer.
< Mesa City Manager Chris Brady.
He's the one who runs the city from inside City Hall.
He's been doing his job since getting hired-away from San Antonio as an "outsider" in 2005. 15 years is enough time to have created a track-record. The 2019 Wallet Hub Survey says more about the city manager's performance in fifteen years than the mayor's five years on the city council.
In evaluating how well a city is run, what are the top five indicators?
 
_________________________________________________________________________________
To be fair and balanced, readers of this blog can also note that in 2018 WalletHub published this report
To find the best school systems in the country, WalletHub ranked each state for quality and safety. Withing the "quality" rank, the site looked at things like graduation rate, dropout rate, math and reading scores and ACT and SAT scores. The "safety" category considers factors like bullying, drug use and school shootings.
By Lidia Ryan on July 30, 2018 12:37 PM 
Arizona #49 Public School Ranking by State                      
_________________________________________________________________________________
WalletHub does a lot of Rankings: See How Mesa rates
Latest from wallethub.com
Mesa #86
 


_________________________________________________________________________________

Lighting Then VS Now: Fire Before Electricity

3 main sources of light