Our pursuit of innovation
Earlier this year, we had an opportunity to host the Innovation & Technology team from South Bend, Indiana for a knowledge exchange session covering data management, open data, performance management, and various other topics. Simply put, we learned a lot from what they shared – starting with the elegance of their team’s motto “listen first, build with.”
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.
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.”
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.
Roads in the City of Syracuse have it rough. Every day, thousands of cars drive along them, they endure brutal weather conditions and let’s not forget the copious amounts of road salt used to help drivers during the region’s tough winters. During the construction season, the City of Syracuse undertakes road reconstruction projects to repave and patch some of its roads.
But how does the city decide which roads should undergo reconstruction? Earlier this year, API worked with Corey Driscoll Dunham, the Chief Operating Officer of the City of Syracuse, the Department of Public Works (DPW), and the Syracuse Metropolitan Transportation Council (SMTC) to examine the City's road reconstruction process, better understand how factors like race and income are correlated with the roads the city has paved in the past and build safeguards into the process to ensure that historically under-served populations and demographic groups are not overlooked by the city’s road reconstruction efforts.
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.
