More on New York County Finances, and Not Just Nassau

by John W Rodat on March 21, 2011

A few days ago, we looked at debt in New York counties (excluding New York City). We found that using several debt measures such as debt per county resident, Nassau County, which is in budgetary trouble, is an outlier.

But of course, there are many other things that we might look at and the most obvious is per capita spending. We excluded sales tax distributions to cities, towns and villages because those funds are used for non-county purposes and because there was an accounting change in 2007, which would have distorted the trend. What do we find?

Well, Nassau County is still an outlier, but not the only one on the high side. The most significant in recent years is Lewis County, which isn’t shocking because it’s relatively small. Hamilton, which is the smallest, has had high per capita expenditures also. Lewis is the 4th smallest.

Of particular note, other high cost counties are in the Hudson Valley region and include Westchester, Sullivan, and Rockland.

However, this time we also looked at the low end outliers. Saratoga, has a pattern of spending the least per county resident. But so does Putnam County, which is in the same region as Westchester, Sullivan, and Rockland. Putnam is relatively wealthy and that warrants review as a contributing factor.

Not surprisingly, the increase from 2008 to 2009 was a mere $3, and there was also a minor reduction in the variability between counties.

Note: Each dot on the graph represents a county. The line that runs through each year represents the mean for each year, weighted for population. Here’s the graphic.

 

 

Tagged as: County, Expenditures, JMP, New York, Use the Damn Data

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Visualizing Concentration of Historical Events

by John W Rodat on March 21, 2011

Gareth Lloyd, a software engineer at the BBC and Tom Martin pulled Wikipedia events that have geographical coordinates and did a neat, animated, historical visualization. Using Google Fusion and Maps, they also did a heat map.

Lloyd and Martin did this for History Hackday.

Is it biased? Sure, by whatever biases have accumulated in Wikipedia, and the English version at that.

What’s the relevance? Governmental documentation and data are still overwhelmingly on paper. Even when not, they’re still usually known only to those who directly use inaccessible databases in proprietary or archaic file formats. Whatever the cause, they’re not available to others in government who would find the embedded information useful, much less to the public.

But using the same tools and techniques as Lloyd and Martin as well as others, they could be.

Tagged as: Animation, Geotag, Heat Map, History, Journalism, Python, Visualization

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Peanut, Peanut Butter

by John W Rodat on March 21, 2011

Too much of economics is pure theory with no data.

Take a look at James Hamilton’s commentary at Econobrowser on a paper by Chevalier and Kashyap. The authors actually used grocery store price data.

What variability is hidden behind national economic data?

Tagged as: Dynamics, Economics, Prices, Use the Damn Data

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

For openers … the case of Nassau County, New York

by John W Rodat on March 17, 2011

It’s bad enough when we don’t bother gathering data to assess where we are, how we’re doing, and where we going. But to gather data and not use it is both foolish and wasteful. Not making governmental data – the public’s data – available to the public in a usable form undermines our ability to effectively govern ourselves.

Take the case of Nassau County, New York.

At the end of 2010, a formerly dormant Financial Control Board threatened the County that it would seize control of its finances if it did not come to grips with the decisions it needed to make. It did not and they did. The lawsuits have already begun, but so far the Court has upheld the Control Board’s decision. (See here also.)

So now the pain begins with layoffs, and other cutbacks.

Could this have been foreseen? Clearly something’s been going on in Nassau – for a long time. While it hasn’t been losing money and it is very wealthy, its expenditures per capita and its debt load per capita have, for a decade, been extreme outliers among New York counties. Take a look at some debt measures for example. They include debt outstanding per capita, debt service as a percent of total expenditures, and debt outstanding as a percentage of total annual revenue (PDF): Nassau Debt.  In each measure, they are the highest by a large margin and they have been for years.

It probably would have been good for the public to see this. More analyses will follow as we get to them.

Issues, governmental programs and operations have all become increasingly complex. But the information, in understandable form, regarding those issues, programs and operations has not kept up. And that’s the central focus of our efforts, making the public’s data available, providing context and comparisons, and understandable to the public.

Tagged as: County, Debt, Finance, Nassau, New York

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Next Entries →