America’s Best-Run Cities: How Florida Towns Rank

ST. PETERSBURG, FL — When it comes to the effectiveness of local leadership, Florida’s biggest metro areas have room for improvement. That’s according to a new analysis that ranked 150 of America’s biggest cities based on the effectiveness of their leadership.

The folks at WalletHub, the website dedicated to all things personal finance, conducted the analysis as budget crunches and impasses plague several states across the country. The website’s number crunchers dove into data related to 33 performance indicators in order to create a “Quality of City Services” score for each of the 150 ranked metro areas.

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Cities were ranked based on six key categories: financial stability, education, health, safety, economy, and infrastructure and pollution. Data sources included the U.S Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Moody’s Investor Services and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others.

When the numbers were crunched Nampa, Idaho, earned the top spot, followed by Provo, Utah, in second place. The top five was rounded out by Boise, Idaho, Missoula, Montana, and Lexington-Fayette, Kentucky. The lowest-ranked city on the list is Washington, D.C.

Not a single city in Florida made the top 50. St. Petersburg, however, ranked the best in the Sunshine State with a 56th-place position, putting it squarely in the top half of the rankings.

Other Florida cities included in the analysis ranked as follows:

• Hialeah, No. 86
• Tallahassee, No. 101
• Tampa, No. 103
• Jacksonville, No. 104
• Orlando, No. 105
• Miami, No. 106
• Fort Lauderdale, No. 113

To read the full ranking report, visit WalletHub online. To find out more about the methodology used, check out this explanation provided by WalletHub.

Photo via the City of St. Petersburg’s Facebook page.