Making an Impact: How API's Interns Helped Solve a $30,000 Problem
Swapping Insights with Colleagues from South Bend, Indiana
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.”
Smart Shoveling: Creating a Data Tool for Fire Hydrant Snow Removal
Big snowstorms have serious implications for city operations, with one lesser-known impact being that the Syracuse Fire Department (SFD) has to shovel all of the roughly 5,700 fire hydrants in the city. The Fire Department recognized an opportunity to track the status of hydrant shoveling in real time and, consequently, to better allocate their resources during a storm. So, SFD approached our Office of Analytics, Performance, and Innovation (API).
Syracuse's First Open Data Day
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.
Data-driven Success in the Sanitation Cart Rollout
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.
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.