Your Government, Live and in Living Color
Bringing CivLab's government graph to New York City
Yesterday
released the latest version of a government graph for San Francisco.You can read the launch post here, go directly to the graph itself here, or watch this quick video tour:
This is a great look into the structure and budget of government, as well as relevant commentary on it. The NYC graph will launch with detailed budget tools to help anyone visualize things like education spending.
I am working with Michael to bring this to New York City.
I will, of course, integrate this tool into my government classes, research, and writing. But many actors throughout the civic system will have productive uses for it.
One of my particular points of excitement is the clarity this will bring to internal political party governance and its relationship to the judiciary. But, of course, it will do so much more, as it does now, like the budget visualizations and newsfeeds.
Would you use this tool? Let me know how, and what you’d want from it. How would you use it? What parts of your life do you want to be easier?
Do you work inside an agency, and want more visibility into your organization?
Do you work in oversight, and want more visibility about who is responsible for what, and where money flows?
Are you a news organization (or an independent blogger) that would like to embed government visualizations into your posts?
Are you an advocate who wants to understand how your corner of the policy world is connected together?
Are you, perhaps, new to your elected position (or soon to be), and want more visibility into the apparatus you oversee for you and your staff?
What about all of this for the state government, and New York’s public authorities like the MTA?
Michael and I will are planning an event in New York City to discuss all of this and more, and that will be announced on the Maximum New York calendar. You can subscribe to it here. The event will also be announced on this newsletter.
Exciting to hear that you are working on the NYC version of this tool!
One thought that comes to mind is the need for systematic tracking of bond issuance and "backdoor borrowing" by NYS public authorities. Under the NYS Debt Reform Act of 2000, the legislature attempted to impose statutory caps on outstanding debt and debt service by the state fisc. Many of these guardrails have been successfully circumvented, however (e.g. FYs 20-21 and 21-22), with deliberate carveouts in the state budget those years to exempt new bond issuance from the Act's limitations. Not to mention other statutory attempts to get around the Act and the Constitutional general obligation debt limits, like funding SUNY dormitory construction. (DiNapoli has a great report on all this: https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/pdf/roadmap-for-state-debt-reform.pdf)
With the individual most probable to prevail in November's mayoral election antsy to pursue very fiscally expansionary initiatives, it seems that the state's legal structures around debt issuance can no longer be a sidelined conversation, and debt data ought to be visualized and mainstreamed for policymakers in 2026.
I cannot wait for NYC gov graph 🗽