Equity

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Making Payments Easier Starts with the End User

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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.”

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Defining a roadmap for procurement transformation in Syracuse

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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.

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Building Equity in Road Reconstruction

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Building Equity in Road Reconstruction

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.

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Summer Intern Cohort Reflection

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Summer Intern Cohort Reflection

Over the summer our office was fortunate to have hosted a cohort of very bright and driven interns, you’ve met them in a few of our previous blog posts you can read HERE. During our time together we had the pleasure and privilege to get to know these wonderful young women and work alongside them on a number of different projects and programs where their fresh perspectives and ideas proved to be invaluable to us. Before they left us to get back to their studies at Harvard and Syracuse University we asked them to summarize the work they completed with us over the 8-week internship and to highlight some of their favorite projects. Please read on to see how their summer went and all the great work that they helped us to accomplish!

Spatial Data – the Roadmap to Data Analysis in the City of Syracuse

Spatial Data – the Roadmap to Data Analysis in the City of Syracuse

We use spatial data every day – navigating from point A to point B, delivery of mail and packages to an address, identifying boundaries of our homes. Spatial data is some of the most useful data to communicate information; we can communicate where something is, how far away it is, how we can navigate there, and aggregate to spatial shapes (i.e., your street block or zip code) to identify characteristics of an area. Spatial data is information captured in a shape - think points, lines, or polygons. Information stored in these shapes then allows us to map the information in relation to other information. This can include how close or far away something is, how big or small something is, and how two areas of information compare to something near it (how does your neighbor impact you?).

The City produces spatial data often to help us communicate the narrative of key information to residents. This can vary across a wide variety of topics, from where water main breaks are happening, to what streets are closed for road reconstruction, to what neighborhood an address belongs to, to how close a school is to a resident’s house, or to the last time a snow plow cleared the road a citizen is traveling on. All of this information is communicated clearly and concisely through maps comprised of spatial data. In this post, we will explore several examples of how the City uses spatial data to measure and improve services.