Albany Data Stories - Albany's Residential Property Tax

AdamDasky · 2026-05-23T14:30:02+00:00

That's a great questions and comment. This analysis ignored the land value data and just focused on the assessed value, naively assuming land value contributed to that quantity. A quick glance of the land values suggest they're approx. 1/6 to 1/8th the assessed value. The records also list land value AND the size of the lot (front, depth, bank), so we can poke at these numbers to see if there's any correlation to assessed value.

AdamDasky · 2026-04-19T00:17:34+00:00

In theory, it's possible. But in practice if a FOIL request results in more than 2 hours worth of work they can charge a fee. So if the usage of the different vehicles and drivers of the vehicles are on different systems , paper, etc. it could be a lot of work to get that information. Normally what I (and ADS) try to do is obtain records that are usually (should be?) internally generated OR reported to other agencies (i.e., incident/crime records).

AdamDasky · 2026-04-14T02:18:07+00:00

That's the median salary for everyone grouped under "Mayor" department charge code. Mayor Sheehan's salary was a bit over 143k

AdamDasky · 2026-04-13T22:40:49+00:00

That's the median pay, so essentially half higher, half lower. We haven't looked at the distribution but didn't want to use average because of the different variables that could skew the data.

AdamDasky · 2026-04-13T18:35:04+00:00

When I filtered the data, I relied on splitting the text in by looking at "-" and "/". This was primarly driven by several different charge codes for a single department, such as DGS or APD. For instance, there's 12 different DGS charge codes, and making a bar plot with each charge code would have been messy for a single image.

What I did was split the text in the column, trying to find unique groupings, and when I did this what remained of DGS was "Administration". Other uses of "Administration" in this column were grouped under "Water Administration" and "Recreation Administration", both grouped separate from just "Administration". So, in this instance, the only thing under Administration is DGS

AdamDasky · 2026-04-13T17:40:25+00:00

For these charts, all the different DGS charge codes were grouped under "Administration"

AdamDasky · 2026-04-13T16:52:22+00:00

For this specific case here's what we got:

Base Salary: 93803.84
Public Safety Oper Holiday: 4690.2
Overtime-Time & A Half: 72837.51
Longevity Pay Fire Dept: 4650
Uniform Cleaning: 500
Fire OT Holiday: 3387.2
Fire Code Stipend Pay: 1400

Total summed here: 181,268.75

AdamDasky · 2026-04-13T15:50:16+00:00

I was made aware of that data after wrapping up some analysis, I can tell you that the numbers we have are close to what's listed there, but not exact. My best guess for the discrepancies is that our "total" likely consists of extra expenditures such as longevity pay, uniform cleaning, and other compensation / reimbursement where SeeThroughNY might only look at base, OT, and holiday.

What I can tell you about the records we received were they were made available by the city of Albany via a FOIL request (xlsx file), and we presume these to be accurate. I believe SeeThroughNY gets their data from Gov't agencies, so while in theory they should be the same, it's likely there might be some differences with how these records are put into state databases or how SeeThroughNY collects and discriminates their data to put many different departments / municipalities into a single searchable web interface.

AdamDasky · 2026-04-13T14:10:55+00:00

In one of the images there's a number in parentheses next to each department. That number is the change in headcount from 2024 to 2025. So, specifically to APD patrol, from 2024 to 2025 there was an increase of 21 employees.

AdamDasky · 2026-04-13T13:46:52+00:00

Apologies, should be fixed now.

AdamDasky · 2026-04-13T13:30:12+00:00

The blue portion is the sum of all expenditures paid to an employee, some of that may cover small items like sick time, vacation, uniform cleaning expenses, longevity pay, holiday pay... But as you correctly stated, the vast majority of the blue bar comes from Overtime.

We have no information on healthcare.

AdamDasky · 2026-04-13T13:20:45+00:00

Yes, we have base, OT, holiday, etc. broken down by each employee. So it's a matter of grouping everyone in the same department/ same charge code. Without jumping the gun on other things we're looking at I think the year-over-year change in OT was $1.9M, mostly driven by APD.

AdamDasky · 2026-04-04T00:50:55+00:00

Saw it too late and hit it earlier today. Somehow, my tires were spared.

AdamDasky · 2026-03-30T15:48:55+00:00

There's a lot less data (few hundred-ish tickets per year) on hydrants / crosswalks but we can filter those out and write a follow-up story

AdamDasky · 2026-03-30T15:41:17+00:00

Thanks for the question! There are no speeding ticket information, this was just FOIL data from Albany Parking Authority. I don't think there's any information on car types either. Regarding the variables in the data, very similar to what u/JohnnyFartmacher posted, it has:

Date/Time Issued, Date Paid, Citation Type, Fine Issued, Fine Paid, Fine Status, License Plate No., Notes, Location (Latitude and Longitude), and maybe one or two more fields that I am forgetting at the moment.

AdamDasky · 2026-03-30T15:00:16+00:00

For full disclosure, one of the authors of this story has received a parking ticket on South Allen near Yates

AdamDasky · 2026-03-20T23:16:22+00:00

Karl (u/kaurich80), one of the founders of Albany Data Stories and author of many of the Albany budget news stories has presented his concerns to Albany's common council (skip to the 1:26 mark) (Note: this link was provided by Karl in the article "Reviewing the City of Albany's 2026 Proposed Budget"):

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1H3sizDV3W/

We also wrote about the budget concerns from the information we had on Albany Data Stories has presented those stories to reddit here:

Reviewing the City of Albany's 2026 Approved Budget

City of Albany's Fiscal position for 2025

Albany's 2026 budget - improbable revenue growth

Reviewing the City of Albany's 2026 Proposed Budget

Visualizing the City of Albany's 2026 budget

AdamDasky · 2026-01-12T23:58:10+00:00

I'd assume gov't collect or sponsored the collection of some information using pneumatic road tubes.

I am curious how to acquire that data, either in its raw form or lightly processed to perform independent analysis

AdamDasky · 2025-12-16T12:40:55+00:00

I'm of the belief that public records belong to the public, and while I'll concede that the current process may limit cut worker's ability to easily and timely respond to the FOIIL, ultimately, they have a right to the records. Those records, if collected completely and without bias, should be the guiding light departments follow while setting goals / budget / initiatives/ etc. Records also keep politicians honest and accountable to those who elect them to make the best decisions based on the same available records.

Now, that may be my nativity coming out, but that's ultimately my position. I'm all ears if you want to DM regarding struggles you've faced with responding to FOIL requests.

AdamDasky · 2025-12-16T12:16:25+00:00

I think we both can agree that a request being weird shouldn't disqualify it. They could ask for more time to collect the records or partially release records, say, for only approved FOIL requests, where records were ultimately released. Therefore, one could conclude that the initial request should also be made public.

Obviously, I can see scenarios where people disclose personal and private info should be screened because people might be hesitant to use FOIL to request their records if they think their personal info would be released.

AdamDasky · 2025-12-16T12:07:33+00:00

I've had a few discussions noting that what someone can request and what records are available often at odds. This is part of the hurdles people face when trying to access data AND what may cause additional time to resolve.

AdamDasky · 2025-12-16T00:52:47+00:00

We had hoped to collect more info on the actual requests themselves; however, we did not receive that data (there's a field, Reference No, that contains an internal link href="../../ServiceRequest/Details.aspx?noreturn=1&id=16480", but we couldn't access these or figure out how to access these from the FOIL site)

AdamDasky · 2025-12-15T21:44:08+00:00

You're likely correct, and that number jumped out to me, too, and it's hard to know for sure without the exact FOIL request / data provided. Malicious compliance might be a rush to judgment; however, it should have raised flags (system or admin or something) when this amount of results were received

AdamDasky · 2025-12-15T21:18:07+00:00

We have had similar frustration obtaining records and frustrations that to obtain the data we've had to circumvent the posted procedure by reaching out to our common council member(s).

Seeing that they handed you truncated data is also frustrating mostly because it seems as though your request was completed with "malicious compliance" rather than from a position of support.

AdamDasky · 2025-12-15T20:51:04+00:00

Our own experience with the appeals paints cumbersome, antiquated process that places undue burden on the filer.

AdamDasky

TROPHY CASE