John W Rodat

More Measures of Muni Fiscal Stress

February 5, 2013 County Government

Yesterday, the Budget Division of New York’s Governor, Andrew Cuomo, released a list of municipalities indicating at least one form of fiscal distress. While the list and measures are preliminary (for information only), they are evidently precursors of more definitive measures that would enable municipal governments to benefit from capped binding arbitration decisions in labor […]

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Enhancing Our NYS Interactive Budget Visualization

January 28, 2013 Budget

We’ve added some new screens to our interactive visualization of the New York State Budget. You’ll find two new screens showing historical change by functions and a screen that shows the estimated current and proposed levels of full-time equivalent employees. Next up? Adding receipts/revenues and some other functionality. And most important, from time-to-time, we’ll actually […]

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Jorgen Randers in Albany to Discuss 40 Year Global Forecast

January 25, 2013 Energy

Jorgen Randers is coauthor of the classic, The Limits to Growth (1972) and also of The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (2004). In early February, Randers will be in Albany, discussing his new book, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years. I’ve never heard him speak, but I’ve read the first two […]

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Empire Center’s Tool on the NYS Budget

January 25, 2013 Budget

The Empire Center‘s SeeThroughNY has created and put online a new tool for examining New York’s Budget. It features: A nice, clean interface Ability to download the data into Excel files Trendline graphics Popup explanations and definitions of some terms and titles, e.g., the difference between “All Funds” and “State Operating” funds. “Special Features,” which […]

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Government Technology Notices Us

January 24, 2013 Data

Government Technology ran a story this morning, Transparency: New York State Reveals All (Its Numbers) on the Governor’s budget transparency initiative. And they even mentioned the interactive visualizations that we put online. Who knows how they found us so quickly, but thanks.

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Opening New York’s Budget

January 24, 2013 Budget

We recently congratulated Governor Cuomo for his promoting data transparency in his State of the State message. Little did we know how quickly his administration was moving to actually take concrete steps to make it so. Yesterday’s Budget showed us not only that his commitment was serious, but that the staff of the State Division […]

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Making the Public’s Data Public – Cuomo Edition

January 9, 2013 Data

Well, this seems an especially appropriate topic with which to kick off our 2013 posts. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s 2013 State-of-the-State address’s includes an entire section on using technology to promote “transparency.” Among other things, the Governor has now committed to providing online copies of the State budget in “machine-readable” form. That means you […]

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Happy New Year

December 31, 2012 Uncategorized

Got an email earlier today noting (complaining?) that I’d been offline for about a month. Apologies to all. Was initially caught up in work. Then came the shooting of children in Connecticut … Everything else instantly seemed to become too small to publish on and I wasn’t ready to say anything about the shooting. Not […]

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The Albany Times-Union is Correct

December 4, 2012 Audit

In an editorial today, Mr. Conners’ outrageous idea, the Times-Union pointedly says that the County Comptroller should not be given subpoena power. They are correct. Very. Much of the TU’s reasoning is based on Conners’ release of personal information earlier this year, which included Social Security Numbers. After that debacle, I wrote, Conners Knew His […]

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NY Counties Sharing Sales Tax Revenue With Cities & Towns

December 3, 2012 Cities

There’s a little Albany debate going on on Twitter right now about which counties share more of their sales tax revenue with local cities, towns and villages. It’s part of the lead in to what’s likely to be a contentious meeting of the Albany County Legislature. Simultaneously, a couple members of the City of Albany’s […]

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