What are we working on?

We have a number of things that we are looking at for our next stories:

1.  Updating the "Who are Albany's vendors story?" with 2023 and 2024 data.  We have FOIA'ed the data from the City of Albany on 2/27/25.  We are awaiting this data as of 4/15/25.

2.  Digging into the school camera data.  We can imagine some questions that we want to ask.  Which camera produces the most tickets?  What is the trendline of tickets?  How many tickets are getting paid?   What times of day are tickets typically issued?  We FOIA'ed this data on 2/27/25.  Unfortunately our FOIA was denied.  The data is held by the 3rd party that owns and runs the speed cameras.  We have filed an appeal using Albany's FOIA appeals process on 4/1/2025

3.  PILOT payments (payments in lieu of taxes) - Who?  How much?  We have FOIA'ed PILOT data from 2020-2025 on 2/27/25.  Our initial FOIA was denied and we have refiled a FOIA.

4.   We have filed a FOIA to get "missing" or unposted financial accounting statements that aren't found here - https://www.albanyny.gov/462/Financial-Statements-Documents - Our goal is to try out Strong Towns Finance Decoder - https://www.strongtowns.org/accounting#download - we just found out about this and it would be neat to work through the decoder for Albany City (or maybe Albany County - haven't looked at this) so we can figure out what the output looks like and how it could be a data story, or a piece of a data story.  

5.  We also looked at some data regarding Albany Police Department's Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program.  In doing so we found that the APD is has developed a track record of communicating LEAD status, although note that the latest data is from 2023.

6.  We are obtaining 2024 property data so that we can do some comparative analysis, 2023 to 2024 changes, year over year

7.  We have a concept of an article related to the landfill.  The landfill closure is very topical and can we construct a P&L for the landfill over time?

8.  Cannabis tax revenue - we had noted that the revenue line for cannabis increases dramatically in the proposed budget - how can we understand this more?