Streamlining Mailing Processes: How Automation Resolves Manual Tasks and Eliminates Backlog
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.
Looking for Change in our Assessment Change Process
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.
Making Payments Easier Starts with the End User
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.”
Data Governance in the City of Syracuse
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.
Defining a roadmap for procurement transformation in Syracuse
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.
Defining a Data Strategy for the City of Syracuse
What does it take to be a data-driven city government? Over the past year, for the City of Syracuse, it has meant a multi-pronged approach. Among our more visible projects is a partnership with Esri we expanded our snowplow map into a winter weather operations tool, tracking the updated sensors in our snow-plowing operations, which received over 10 thousand visits in the first storm of the last season alone and was recognized with an award for Special Achievement in GIS. We have also taken a performance-based approach to implementing the American Rescue Plan injection of $123 million dollars, with a public-facing dashboard that provides updated insights into how well we are spending federal spending dollars, and has been recognized as a national case study. And working side-by-side with our department of public works, we’ve piloted the inclusion of equity metrics in our road reconstruction investments.
The Art & Importance of a Gemba Walk
“Our work changed a lot during the pandemic.” We’ve heard this phrase quite a bit over the last couple of years as we (the global “We”) have adjusted – and readjusted several times over – to a world in which face-to-face interaction – a fundamental piece of what makes us human, was no longer safe. Now, just over two years since we went from in-person meetings, coffee chats, and sticky note-on-the-wall workshops to shared WebEx screens and 9x9 little square faces on our laptops, we’re slowly starting to venture back into the formerly comforting but now unknown territory of in-person interaction. For local government innovators, this transition “back” – even in small increments, is a welcome (understatement) change.