Our pursuit of innovation
Syracuse held its first Open Data Day on Saturday November 4th at the Onondaga County Public Library in Downtown Syracuse. Over 100 participants came together to celebrate civic open data, attend educational sessions (on topics ranging from how to use Tableau to the synergy between urbanism, AR and open data portals) and engage in a hackathon focused on transportation data.
Over the last year and a half our team in the Office of Analytics, Performance and Innovation team worked with the Department of Public Works, Communications, SYRCityline and other departments to coordinate the rollout of standardized, 96-gallon sanitation carts for City residents. Our team leveraged a data-driven approach to help facilitate the rollout and measure the success of a phased approach.
In the current digital era, businesses are always looking for new methods to leverage data to boost production and efficiency. Local governments can do the same. The data engineering team at the Analytics, Performance, and Innovation (API) office has been working with the Bureau of Administrative Adjudication (BAA) to automate some of their mailing procedures.
What is the BAA?
BAA is involved in hearing and ruling on administrative matters as part of its position as an administrative case adjudicator. This means holding fair and impartial hearings, examining evidence, hearing the viewpoints of all parties, and making binding conclusions or orders. Once the orders are made, BAA typically uses physical mail to contact property owners and alert them of any infractions or notices related to their non-compliant property code ticket disputes. The issue emerges, though, when a sizable portion of the mail is returned as a result of incorrect address labeling, creating a backlog of awaiting mail that needs to be dispatched.
As one of our more behind-the-scenes departments, our assessment employees are some of the unsung heroes of city government. They’re a small department with big responsibilities which include functions like providing accurate and equitable assessments on the value of every city property, processing residential property exemptions, the processing of deeds, as well as ensuring one-time additions for services are applied to resident taxes, like when your street gets its slurry seal.
Here in Syracuse, we have 41,500 properties city-wide with 10 staff members within the assessment department, that’s a lot to manage and track with their many functions and all in the tides of a quickly changing housing market that has seen unprecedented change in the last 3 years. This has caused our Equalization Rate (a score delivered by the State that tells us the level of our property assessments across our property base) to fall quite significantly over the last 5 years.
API had the opportunity to attend the conclusion of New York City’s Open Data Week this year. This event was organized by the City of New York’s Office of Technology and Innovation as well as BetaNYC, which is a community group that helps to educate and organize community events community members on New York City’s open data.
The event was held at CUNY Law School in Queens, NY, which was a full day event host by the school. Here, hundreds of community members who are passionate about open data gathered to learn about information on NYC Open Data portal, hear about the interplay between its open data program and NYC government, and see some innovative projects that were built on this foundation.
The event kicked off with City Councilors, NYC Staff, and a NY State Senator talking about how they use open data as a tool to gather insight into the issues facing their constituents. Hon. Jennifer Gutierrez, NYC Council Member and Chair of the Technology Committee, shared that open data helps her learn where the specific issues in her district are. She stated that without this data, she is limited to what constituents report to her office. She stated that open data allows her to have greater visibility into where government needs to provide better services.
Background
In early 2020, API participated in a 10-week learning opportunity through What Works Cities at Results for America focused on helping cities learn how to take immediate steps toward ending or reducing the impact of driver’s license suspension in their communities. In the US, driver’s license suspension due to nonpayment of fines and penalties, or failure to appear for traffic court, is legal in many states and municipalities but results in loss of economic opportunity, and autonomy, and reduces public safety. The opportunity, hosted by What Works Cities in partnership with the Fines and Fees Justice Center and the City of Durham Innovation Team, prompted us to evaluate the impact of debt-based license restrictions on our own community by looking at quantitative data on the concentration of driver’s license suspensions by census tract disaggregated by suspensions due to failure to pay or “appear.”
Midway through the 10-week sprint, we had a conversation with the State Director of the ongoing campaign in New York State aimed at passing legislation that would prevent State and local government bodies from suspending driver’s licenses on the basis of failure to pay or appear. She spoke hopefully that the legislation would soon be passed during the coming legislative session in the spring, which it did. That minimized the role that the City of Syracuse would have to play in proactively advocating for change on the local level. With the work minimized, we wondered what type of impact other municipal fines and fees assessed to residents were having, particularly if those fines and fees were disproportionately impacting communities of color.
When Syracuse devised its City’s Cloud-based data platform, it became evident that the first step towards creating a data-driven culture was breaking data silos by cataloging, cleaning, combining, and consolidating datasets that existed in numerous systems across multiple departments.
As datasets constantly evolve and grow, the need to proactively monitor changes, update systems, and evaluate the usefulness of our data was also evident. Thus determining broader data policies as an ongoing citywide program was needed. We called this our City’s data governance program.
That led to June 2022, when the City of Syracuse started its Data Governance Committee to enable the organization to create a data ecosystem where our data assets are easier to find and access, and our data practices maintain responsible, ethical, and safe standards of use that comply with legal requirements.
Although most of us might not think about procurement on a regular basis, there are some whose professional careers are built around it, and they don’t just “buy stuff” for an organization. Their job also involves implementing techniques and tools to ensure that money is being spent effectively, equitably, and responsibly.
Here in Syracuse, we spend a big chunk of our budget on purchasing goods and external services: everything from office supplies to hiring consultants to audit a specific department, to multi-million dollar construction projects. Given that we are a major spender in our community, it's about time we take a long hard look at our procurement practices and ensure that we are cultivating vendor diversity, equitably distributing our resources, and continuously achieving improved outcomes.
But this is a tall order to fill when you stop to think about all the complex policies, laws, processes, people and functions that go along with procurement.
