The Resort Municipality of Whistler has shifted the publication of its annual monitoring report from November/December to spring 2001 in a bid to bring more consistency and relevance to the data.
The Whistler Community & Resort Monitoring Program was initiated in 1993 with the goal of providing an annual measure of local qualities of life, the environment and guests’ experience. The information gathered ranges from scientific data concerning water quality to the number of parking stalls, from skier visits to school enrolment. The report findings are used to identify areas of need within the community and to guide future planning decisions.
RMOW director of planning and development, Mike Purcell says releasing the report in November made capturing a full year of statistics impossible. He says by offering a full calendar year’s statistics, the report will finally be able to "compare apples with apples."
"Our problem under the previous system was that some sets of data were only available at the end of each calendar year rather than from October to October, so we could only run the previous year’s data."
Collecting information in October also cut into the middle of some data collection periods, he added.
Purcell says having an extra four months or so to prepare the report in the new year will allow late entries to be included, as well as standardizing of the whole process. The monitoring report will be available to the general public upon publication.
