Pensacola is a big enough small city that you sometimes get the feeling folks are only separated by six degrees.

For a while, I thought it was a thing I noticed because I married a local, and we couldn’t go anywhere without running into someone he knew from school or childhood. But it isn’t.

Here the people are friendly, they make you feel at home quickly and once you see the sunset over Pensacola Bay, or you are at Fort Pickens and see the Blue Angels zoom by at what seems a fingertip’s distance, it’s hard to think of this place without a warm feeling welling up in your chest.

Sometimes all that closeness lends an air of doing for others so that they will do for you. Which makes that warm feeling in your chest feel like heartburn.

That’s when that down-homey niceness starts to feel like it’s meant to put you in your place. You know the types, the ones who like to remind you of all the people they know, in case you were wondering. It seems a peculiar Pensacola-ism to talk about luring talented people from outside the area to come here and then dog-cuss them for trying to do things differently. Such criticisms usually fall into two broad categories: “You aren’t from around here,” and, “Who do you think you are to criticize that?” Friends, both of those arguments put you on shallow intellectual ground. When either of those things are directed at me, my response is: Yes, I’m not from around here, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love it here.

This is not my hometown, but it is my home. And if that’s not enough for you, it says more about you than about me. Now is the time for Pensacola to get out of its own way. I honestly believe we could open a lot of big doors for this community. We need to let those doors swing wide. We need to let all kinds of voices be heard, from the Westside to East Pensacola Heights, from Warrington to Nine Mile Road. We need to acknowledge our successes — Navy Federal’s expansion, landing Southwest Airlines, the buzz around downtown’s renaissance, moving tourism dollar governance definitively into the sunshine, declining unemployment — but we need to keep our eyes on the prize. If we want to mark our progress, we need to do so in ways that are measurable, meaningful and honest. Our team has developed a community scorecard to create a data-driven snapshot of where the community is and to provide a baseline for where we want to go. To move forward we must be honest about where we are. The cynics will say we use data to say things we already know: that generational poverty and lack of educational attainment have a tight grip on portions of Pensacola and that is what keeps this community from making a great leap forward. You may believe that “everyone already knows” low education levels are tied to poverty, crime rates and low per capita income. I believe that is the argument of deflection.

The question, friends, isn’t whether you know that already. The question is what are you prepared to do about it. You, the public official. You, the elected office holder. You, the business owner. You, the citizen. Because the data is not new. And it has been this way for years. In some cases, decades. We have allowed it to go on, through politically expedient decisions and sins of omission and commission. We, the citizens of this community — with all of its potential and beauty and opportunity — pay for those low wages and poor job prospects and undereducated residents every time a list of “the most dangerous small cities in America” makes it to the top of someone’s search engine results with our community’s name attached. We cannot change that unless we measure it honestly. And keep it at the top of our collective civic mind. That is why we produced this report. That is what we want to do with this data. These measures, and others, will be the yardstick we use to mark Pensacola progress. We hope it helps remove the politics from government and inspires focused conversation on the things we must do to help more of our neighbors do better than just getting by.

The nice thing about data is that it speaks for itself. No spin cycle required. You don’t need to be from around here to see the value in that.