Albany Data Stories

05/02/2026

We have now watched the portion of Albany Mayor Dr. Dorcey Applyrs's press conference that has been posted online and read the related news articles. Importantly, the City has the opportunity to bring in expert resources from the NY State Comptroller to assist with our financial crisis.

With thanks to the Times Union for their reporting, the Mayor's view on this is: "Her announcement came days after Common Council members said the state comptroller's office should be brought in to help the city navigate its budget problems. Applyrs told reports on Friday that she did not believe that was necessary. "I am not seeking the comptroller's services and support in analyzing and reviewing Albany's 2025 or 2026 budget. My team has a firm handle on budget review."

There is a word for this - hubris. Wise and confident people actively seek additional opinions and assistance. To not seek this assistance is a disservice to the citizens and employees of the City of Albany.

Thankfully the Times Union included this chestnut "The power to seek the comptroller's help does not rest entirely with the mayor. Common Council members this week noted that they, or even members of the public, could request a municipal review. Majority Leader Balarin said he favored a June deadline to decide on calling in Comptroller DiNapoli if Applyrs was not open to making the request herself."

"Members of the public"? Well, no time like the present. Over a cup of coffee this morning I shot over a note to the Comptroller's email (image attached). We need assistance now, not June, not when we identify our malaise has worsened. Will post when we hear back from the Comptroller's office

05/01/2026

Update 8pm - video of the press conf is finally live https://www.facebook.com/share/v/18LfFbuX5s/?mibextid=wwXIfr

This is great, we can now review our 5 questions from earlier today and see if the press conference answered them

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We're data people at ADS so we thought we'd share two numbers with everyone - 16 and 0

16 = the number of social media posts on the Albany Mayor Dr. Dorcey Applyrs' FB account since Monday

0 = the number of on-demand ways to watch the Mayor's press conference today announcing that the City's financial position has worsened (nothing on the City's Youtube nor the Mayor's social)

We don't need to see a picture of a ribbon cutting, we want to see our leaders discussing the issues that will impact every single City resident. That's transparency and owning the issues.

In lieu of being able to watch the replay of the press conference what do we have? A Times Union article (with thanks to the newspaper for a quick story), a Spectrum Local News report and a press release from the Mayor's office.

We will repeat what we have said many times before - the City's fiscal crisis was incredibly foreseeable. Anyone involved in City leadership in the last 18 months is disingenous if they claim ignorance.

We're parsing through the press release and the news reports and may have a few comments later this weekend.

05/01/2026

We understand that this morning at 10am Albany Mayor Dr. Dorcey Applyrs is holding a press conference. Here are a number of questions we hope someone asks:

1. The Common Council made a request for 80 pieces of information nearly a month ago. How many of these have been provided to the Common Council so far? If there are delays in getting the CC information please explain why. Will you also commit to making all released information available to the public and what mechanism will you use to do so?

2. The City will certainly need to take dramatic measures to close our budgetary gap. These measures could include property tax increases, cuts to the City budget, relief from New York State, or other measures to generate revenue. You have had over a month to look at the measures that we can take - can you comment on the likelihood of each of these being a part of the plan?

3. Root cause analysis is always important - we assume that your team is understanding how we got into this position. What is your assessment of root causes and what measures do you think the City should take so that we don't repeat the same mistakes? ** note that we're looking for a deeper dig than "we inherited this issue"

4. Are you fully committed to asking the State Comptroller for whatever assistance they can provide?

5. This is a large crisis - can you help us understand the portion of your time that you are spending on the fiscal crisis and how are you balancing time spent on the crisis with time spent on social media opportunities?

We're looking forward to listening in on the presser and may have some comments afterwards.

04/28/2026

What led us to the City's current financial crisis? We are analyzing and communicating some of the root causes, including the Administration's decisions on property tax in the last decade.

From our article:
"For nearly a decade the City Administration valued a low property tax growth rate and as our expenditures caught up with inflation we didn’t raise property taxes, rather we made up the gap with overly optimistic non-property tax revenue sources which didn’t meet expectations, and we had an unrealistic belief that additional state aid would prop up our City's finances and save us from making tough decisions."

https://albanydatastories.com/albanys-property-taxes

04/23/2026

At Albany Data Stories we are big fans of open data and public data availability. Public data is what we use to analyze our City and write our articles. We can use public data because government data _is_ the public’s data. Underpinning this statement is the belief that governments (from Federal to local) must have processes that make data available to the public.

In our background and day jobs we have been a part of teams that have accessed data from 1000s of city, county and state governments; we understand when local governments have a good or bad open data practice. With this experience we can say that the City of Albany has a poor track record for public data availability.

A few anecdotes and links:

1. The City of Albany’s Open Data Portal (which we studied in 2025 - https://albanydatastories.com/albanys-open-data) has not been online since January 2026

2. We have analyzed the throughput of the City’s FOIL processes (https://albanydatastories.com/albanys-foil-responses) and found a concerning responsiveness rate

3. To get access to data we have filed numerous FOILs. Two of our FOILs were denials that we had to appeal. Our story on the Albany speed camera revenue last summer (https://albanydatastories.com/albanys-speed-cams-pt-1) would not have happened without 2+ months of requesting data via a FOIL appeal

4. Lastly, we are concerned when the Common Council makes 80 requests for information from the City’s administration - much of which is information that should be proactively made available – and the data won’t be available for weeks or months

Last summer we put together two documents that we believe define a better open data and public information policy. One document provides context on the need for better policy, the second document is a first attempt at legislation which we have derived from Louisville, KY’s open data law. Louisville has built an amazing track record of open data and we should aspire to be as good.

We put both of the documents in a Google Drive folder for anyone to read. This is the link to the Google Drive folder:

https://tinyurl.com/e4k4wpkb

Our goal is to make citizens aware that the City needs a new approach to public data availability, especially in a time where government transparency is paramount.

Please feel free to reply to this document or drop an email to us at [email protected] if you have any questions, concerns or suggestions.

And if you like what you're hearing, forward this to your Common Council member and see what they have to say.

04/22/2026

"Anyone can cook!" - Auguste Gusteau, Ratatouille

"Anyone can perform basic analysis on their city using public data" - Albany Data Stories

Hi, this is Karl from ADS. As we use the City's data to enable transparency and accountability, there are a couple of additional things we want to do. We want to provide insight on how we perform analysis. We also want to let people experiment with basic analysis to show that _you too_ can perform basic analysis on your city using public data.

A month ago I was guest lecturing over at UAlbany to a great class of students. At the end I asked about their practical experience with spreadsheets and it was low. So I wrote up a short tutorial on how to do some basic analysis on the City of Albany's SeeClickFix data using Google Sheets. We're going to share this same how-to analysis to Albany Data Stories readers.

Below is a link to a Google Drive folder. There is a Google Sheet of data and a document that explains how to walk through a few basic analysis tasks using the data. You will need a google account because you will need to make a copy of the Google Sheet to your own Google Drive. The Google Doc also allows comments, so if something isn't clear, feel free to drop a comment and we'll answer your question or clean up the doc.

Importantly - there is no need to be a data scientist, no need to create complicated spreadsheet formulas. If this works for you, or if you find I write the world's worst documentation - drop a note in the comments!

https://tinyurl.com/3dfktn94

04/21/2026

One follow-up on our IDA article earlier today.

While the final reports and PILOT agreements are not available, we can see the finalized decisions in the "PILOT Deviation Approval Resolution" document for each project. We have included screenshots below for the "Abatement by Year" tables for the 54 State St and 135 Ontario St PILOTs. 135 Ontario St has the 10% abatement for year 20, 54 State St has a 40% abatement for Year 20. These tables can be read as "for any year what percentage of property taxes from the improvements made to the property can the owner avoid?"

In our PILOT analysis article that we reposted on April 17th we discussed a metric that we created to analyze the value of the PILOT abatements for each project, "Percentage of Lifetime Agreement Tax Avoidance" which aggregates the yearly tax abatement values. For example, if you have a 10 year agreement and each year you have an 80% abatement then you have an 80% lifetime avoidance. If you have a 10 year agreement and 5 years you have a 75% abatement and 5 years you have a 25% abatement then you have a 50% lifetime avoidance.

What we found in our research was that it was typical prior to 2021 for PILOT projects to have lifetime avoidance values of 80+% with some projects above 90%. For example, Lofts at 733 Broadway (Norstar Development USA LP) and 40 Steuben LLC (Omni Development) had avoidances for their 2016 20 year PILOTs of 96% and 95%, respectively. These are numbers that are bonkers, why pretend to collect any taxes at all?

In 2021 through early 2025 PILOT arrangements declined with no project over 76%; this represented a win for City residents. Unfortunately when we review the Lifetime Avoidance metric for 54 State St and 135 Ontario St their values are 84% and 77%, the highest lifetime avoidance levels since 2020. Two data points do not make a trend but this is something to watch, will we see the City revert to the large PILOT abatements of the past?

We have included a scatterplot that shows each of the 40+ PILOT agreements, their ex*****on year and their Lifetime avoidance values.

04/20/2026

We understand that in tonight's Common Council meeting there will be a vote on an amendment to the City's Affordable Housing Requirement law. We have been researching Affordable/Inclusive Housing programs to understand the benefit of these programs, in aggregate.

From our article, these are our summary findings:

"We appreciate that the intentions behind the Affordable Housing ordinance are genuine. Our findings through looking at the research and data suggest three things:

1. As local governments across the nation (including the City of Albany) have implemented Inclusive Housing or Inclusive Zoning (IH/IZ) programs there is little to no evaluation of the aggregate benefit (or lack thereof) of the IH/IZ programs other than basic housing unit counts.

2. Reviewing a cross-section of academic research on IH/IZ programs there is little compelling evidence that suggests these programs provide a consistent and material benefit.

3. There is no research that we found that would disprove a concern about the City of Albany’s IH/IZ program - that the program disincents developers to build in the City without significant additional benefits acting as a counterweight, for example large Industrial Development Agency tax breaks."

In our article we share all of the receipts - the research articles and local government programs that we evaluated. If you believe that we're misinterpreting the research or data, let us know and we'd like to turn it into a discussion.

At Albany Data Stories this is one of many things on our minds:  The City of Albany needs thousands of additional housing units for all socioeconomic strata, in all wards and neighborhoods, for households in all stages of life, for today’s residents and future residents as the City’s population...

04/20/2026

Two days ago we reposted a story about Albany’s IDA and PILOT payment analysis not knowing that today’s TimesUnion would have a cover story about three approved IDA projects.

Setting aside that the TU article looks like a press release, we went to look at the details of the three projects on the IDA’s website - https://www.albanyida.com/projects. For every project the IDA will post all project documents including, importantly, a final PILOT agreement and project summary.

None of the three projects currently have these important documents posted. Citizens (us) have no ability to understand the details of what the IDA negotiated with the developer and, importantly, the details of the PILOt agreements.

We are not anti-developer, we are pro transparency.

04/17/2026

We are going to share a 2025 article that we wrote ostensibly about the City of Albany’s PILOT payments, however it’s really about the costs and consequences of the Albany Industrial Development Agency’s involvement in housing development.

Our repost of this article is a part of our current thinking:

1. The best medium- and long-term way for the City to dig itself out of its hole is through housing and commercial development that gets added to the tax roll asap - housing across all socioeconomic strata in all wards

2. The City has distorted the housing development market through Inclusive Zoning, the reliance on the IDA and high permitting costs (note we are writing an article about IZ which will come out soon)

3. One of the best investments that the City can make is to put additional spending into supporting housing development and decreasing the costs and increasing the speed of development. Yes this is counterintuitive… in a time of crisis we need to spend to grow our way out of our problem.

4. Major zoning rework can support housing development by allowing more creative use of land and decreasing NIMBYism

We get that our opinions may not make people happy but we we believe that data supports our position. That being said, tell us where we are wrong but bring some data with you.

Looking at the City of Albany’s budget the word "PILOT" can be found in several places. PILOTs - Payments in Lieu of Taxes - are the vehicle for receiving extra funding from New York State. There also is a line in each yearly budget “Other PILOTs and Taxes” representing over $7 million in .....

04/14/2026

Do we ever write about anything other than City finances? Occasionally 😀

We analyzed rooftop solar installations last summer but never released the article. While the data is a bit dated, this article tackles questions such as "Is the rate of solar energy panel installation going up or down?" and "Where is solar being installed?"

https://albanydatastories.com/albanys-rooftop-solar

04/13/2026

Given the City of Albany's financial crisis there will, without a doubt, be two things that happen in 2026, 2027 and beyond: 1) property taxes are going to go up dramatically and 2) operating and capital spending needs to be cut.

People costs are roughly 60% of the City's budget. Any meaningful cuts to the City's budget will involve eliminating full time positions in many departments.

We analyzed 2024 and 2025 employee salary, overtime and other compensation data to get an understanding of where the City spends money on people and departments.

We posted the first of what will likely be several articles that look at the City's current cost structure - people and non-people costs.

https://albanydatastories.com/albanys-city-salaries