This fall, the Empire Center for Public Policy released its first evaluation of websites for the state’s 500 largest counties, municipalities, and school districts — and gave 85 percent of them failing grades. In the Enterprise coverage area, three were evaluated: The county of Albany and the town of Guilderland both got Fs while the Guilderland Central School District earned a C. Read More
Have a complaint about uncollected trash or a noisy neighbor? New York City has an app for that. Want to know if the streets you’re about to travel to work have been plowed? Chicago has an app for that. Read More
The failing grades given local government websites by the Empire Center for Public Policy shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s tried to use them. Read More
F. F, F, F, F, F, F and F. Those are grades you certainly wouldn’t want to bring home to your parents. Read More
Long Island’s towns and cities paid their workforce less in 2013 than in 2012, with payrolls totaling $692 million — a 4.7 percent decline from $726.5 million the previous year, a Newsday database shows. Read More
White Plains last year had the highest total taxes per capita among cities in New York, while Binghamton had the highest effective property-tax rate in the state, a review Monday found. Read More
Albany and Binghamton topped the list for property taxes in the 2014 update of Benchmarking New York, the Empire Center web tool that connects users with tax, spending and debt data from local governments outside New York City. Read More
It didn’t seem to surprise some local officials that their municipality’s website got a failing grade on a recent report card. Read More