Our pursuit of innovation
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.
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. …
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.”
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.
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.
One of the skills that we have in our team at the Office of Accountability, Performance & Innovation (API) is quickly finding, pulling, and using data about city operations and services. We use this data to build dashboards that track performance and make maps that staff can use to address questions in real-time. The use of this data isn’t just valuable to our departments for internal purposes, it’s also meaningful to our community members as well. There are many reasons our community members appreciate access to this data that we collect. To ensure that we are sharing the data with them in a way that is easy to access and understand we have been busy collecting resident feedback on Open Data Syracuse, our city’s open data portal.
