The city of West Des Moines announced it has significantly improved in a measure of how well its policies and activities support diversity, equity and inclusion toward the LGBTQ community. City officials were recently notified that West Des Moines’ 2020 Municipal Equality Index (MEI) score is now 99 out of 100 points. That score represents an increase of 57 points since the city received its first score of 42 in 2016. The increase reflects new initiatives including the development of youth bullying prevention policies related to city services, participation in LGBTQ job fairs, identifying all-gender single-occupancy restrooms in city facilities, involvement and support of various events sponsored by One Iowa, and offering transgender-inclusive health care benefits to employees. The MEI scorecard, compiled by the Human Rights Campaign, rates more than 500 cities across the country on 49 criteria covering citywide nondiscrimination protections, policies for municipal employees, city services, law enforcement and the city’s leadership on LGBTQ equality. The full Human Rights Campaign report that shows detailed scorecards for every city, as well as a searchable database, is available online at www.hrc.org/mei.