These stats aren't boring

Maybe your eyes glaze over when someone opens a conversation or a chart with statistics.

Want an eye-opening experience? Just try to compete without them.

With due respect to Mark Twain, access to accurate statistics and the trends they illustrate is invaluable for any company or community bent on survival. Those who invest the time and effort required to see how they stack up in a variety of categories are the ones enabling themselves to brag where they can and improve where they must.

A new wave of vital economic statistical data - economic indicators - is headed Kootenai County's way, and it won't cost you, your business or your elected officials a thing to access that valuable information.

In a powerful, positive collaboration, the public and private sectors have come together to create and maintain vital statistics for the Kootenai County area. These will cover several broad topics, including education, housing and health. We're particularly excited about the development of economic vitality indicators because we see the economy as the engine that drives the other areas.

Thanks in particular to the Institute for Public Policy and Economic Analysis at Eastern Washington University, and to the Inland Northwest Community Foundation for a generous grant, a website is being developed that will put invaluable information at your fingertips. In recent weeks, local citizens have met in focus groups to determine the most sought-after indicators for their respective areas. By late next spring or perhaps early summer, all the data will have been compiled and the website will be unveiled.

Then business people will be able to see, for example, how the county's Gross Domestic Product has fared through the economic downtown. (Hint: The county's GDP rose steadily from 2001 to a high of $4.37 billion in 2008, but has dipped to $4.28 billion since then.) They'll also see that the number of employers in the county rose from 4,064 in 2001 to a high of 5,258 in 2008, but has since fallen to 4,957 in 2010, indicating several hundred businesses have closed their doors in the recession's aftermath.

Twain told us, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." Used correctly, though, statistics can unlock doors to a whole lot of truth.