Albany Data Stories

10/19/2026

As the City of Albany contemplates a property tax increase there is an interesting question - are the City's residential homeowners currently taxed more, less or about equal to other cities and suburban towns?

We typically do our own data analysis, however there is a company whose data (and methodologies, and data science) we like - Ownwell. ** Statement upfront - we have no stake in the company, we don't get a financial benefit from giving them props, they don't know we exist.

We can pull out data from their property tax calculator for Capital District cities and towns - https://www.ownwell.com/trends

For every taxing jurisdiction using Ownwell's app you can find the Median Effective Property Tax Rate. The Median Effective Property Tax Rate is the percentage of your home's value that you pay in property tax over a year to any and all taxing authorities. If you have a 2% property tax rate for a home with a $250,000 value you would pay $5,000 in property tax per year.

Below we pulled out the City of Albany's Median Effective Property Tax Rate along with neighboring local governments, 3 county medians for context, and New York State and United States medians as well.

We would suggest that any comparison between two towns has a margin of error, with potentially different systems and approaches between locations. We would suggest that towns within the same county are generally equivalent +/- 0.1% and any town comparison not in the same county are generally equivalent +/-.2%. However that is a general guideline we would give and someone else's approach may be different.

The only goal is to provide context on what the City pays relative to other local governments so that you can decide what is or isn't appropriate as the City discusses property tax increases.

Median Effective Property Tax Rate(%) by Government
2.78% Schenectady
2.62% Niskayuna
2.35% Guilderland
2.29% Delmar
2.26% City of Albany
2.21% Altamont
2.21% Colonie
2.16% **** Albany County *****
2.11% West Sand Lake
2.11% Averill Park
2.05% Loudonville
2.05% Voorheesville
2.04% Menands
2.04% East Greenbush
2.01% Latham
1.92% Cohoes
1.90% **** New York State *****
1.79% Rensselaer
1.72% **** Rensselaer County *****
1.58% Clifton Park
1.49% **** Saratoga County *****
1.43% Saratoga Springs
1.41% Ballston Spa
1.39% Troy
1.02% **** United States *****

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10/13/2026

The 10/19 Common Council meeting will introduce a resolution regarding a commuter tax, also known as a non-resident worker tax.

RESOLUTION 113.102.26R - A RESOLUTION OF THE ALBANY COMMON COUNCIL REQUESTING THAT THE NEW YORK STATE LEGISLATURE GRANT THE CITY OF ALBANY AUTHORITY TO IMPOSE A TAX ON THE EARNINGS OF NONRESIDENTS WHO WORK WITHIN THE CITY (images attached of the full resolution)

At Albany Data Stories we don't support commuter/non-resident worker taxes for several reasons.

1. Commuter taxes are regressive taxes. The resolution requests "...that any enabling legislation permit the City to establish appropriate exemptions, credits, thresholds, or other provisions designed to protect low-income workers and prevent undue economic hardship." Rules for means testing (or other mechanisms) are very complex; it is a very difficult task to determine provisions that are both fair AND easy to implement and understand. In addition, the more we create exemptions, the more the gross revenue of a commuter tax drops.

2. The concept of work and work location has changed. Many people have the flexibility to work from home. We would need to answer questions such as "if a person's office is in downtown and they wfh three days a week do they only pay the commuter tax for two days?" Then we would need to understand if we're going to audit workers and their wfh status. In addition, people increase their rate of work from home in the face of disincentives to work in the office. We could create a system where some portion of workers optimize working from home and don't spend as much money in the City.

3. Commuter taxes could create incentives for companies to leave Albany, or disincentives for companies to stay in Albany.

4. Commuter taxes carry administrative cost and risk - to explain the laws, ensure compliance, work through edge cases, adjudicate issues. Managing the operationalization of a commuter tax would require some form of new cost to the City which we can only guess at.

5. Commuter taxes have no academic research to understand the net benefit. Typically we can draw on policy research to understand what the pros and cons are for any given policy. We went looking for high quality research on commuter taxes and found none. Anyone who suggests that a commuter tax provides an aggregate benefit is only speculating.

6. A commuter tax is another speculative revenue generation scheme. We consider any revenue generation vehicle to be speculative when we a) are beholden to the Legislature to pass it, b) we can only guess at the implementation timeframe, c) we have no idea of the implementation costs, d) we really don't understand the revenue potential, e) we don't understand the unintended consequences. The 2027 proposed budget already has enough speculative revenue generation schemes - City sales taxes, embellishment taxes/fees, hotel/STR taxes, etc - that we really don't need yet another speculative revenue generation scheme.

7. Supporting speculative schemes like commuter taxes takes us away from making hard decisions. What happens in a world where Common Council members (and members of the Administration) believe that a commuter tax is just around the corner? What happens when we pin our hopes on the Legislature supporting a commuter tax? What happens is we don't have to think about making hard budgetary decisions on our people costs, our operating costs and our capital expenditures because of the siren's song of a commuter tax. Because the commuter tax will save us.

10/09/2026

“Can you explain or defend the 15% property tax increase? Why 15% and not a number higher or lower? What happens if the Common Council does not approve this level of increase?"

With Albany Mayor Dr. Dorcey Applyrs beginning a budget listening tour we were thinking through the questions that we want answered, for example the question(s) above. We started a question bank in this Google doc.

We'll add additional questions and clean up the presentation of some of the question as well.

Feel free to use any of these

Questions for the Mayor during the 2027 Budget Listening Sessions Albany Data Stories 10/9/2026 The purpose of this document is to compile questions that we would like the Mayor to answer during the Administration’s 2027 Budget Listening Sessions during October and November. We are focusing...

10/08/2026

This is Karl from ADS. If there is any positive that is coming out of our City's financial crisis it is that residents want to know more - about the root causes, the issues, the decisions, the data and more.

In June we had a great opportunity to speak at the 901 901 Albany Democratic Club's voter education series with Judy Doesschate about the City's finances, debt and budget process.

And now we're excited to be back later this month at The Argus, with a chance to co-present with Common Council Member Brodie.

A closer look at Mayor Applyrs' proposed budget, the financial challenges ahead, and the Common Council’s role in the budget process.

10/07/2026

Earlier we shared Common Council Member Deirdre Brodie's post that minutes prior to last night's Common Common Council Finance Meeting the Albany Mayor Dr. Dorcey Applyrs administration posted a completely new and updated budget.

We wanted to see what the changes looked like so we fed the original budget from last Thursday, 10/1 and the brand new budget into Claude AI and asked for a difference report.

We have posted the differences in the Google Drive folder as a Google Doc.

There are a TON of changes. This revision represents the correction of a concerning volume of factual errors and gaps in the budget. Many of these are corrections to errors and gaps that we noted in our release of the budget review (that pdf is also in the Google Drive folder); we're happy that our budgetary quality control services were valued.

There are still, unfortunately, dozens of unexplained items in the budget. And this doesn't change our underlying concerns (articulated very well by CC Member Brodie) that the revenue side of this budget is a house of cards.

Lastly, this poses all manner of questions:
* can the Administration modify the budget according to the City's Charter?
* will there be more updates in the future?
* if so, what will those updates consist of or be focused on?
* is the Administration going to explain why they are making these changes?
* will the Administration post any form of version control on this document so that anyone can understand the changes?

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pSQvg4WMmr9DdusgW2MEE7L2HSGZE9TO?usp=drive_link

10/06/2026

City Auditor Sam Fein and Patrick Tine from the TU just released an ARPA audit and a great Times Union article.

https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/draft-audit-alleges-widespread-problems-city-22463084.php

We aren’t surprised at all. Last year we were filing FOIls with the City to get ARPA-related documents. Getting any information on ARPA was like pulling teeth.

We sent an email to Chief Auditor Applyrs to attempt to expedite the files. We never received a response.

Stonewalling works. We couldn’t get the files, we couldn’t do the analysis. We moved on.

Again, huge kudos to Sam and Patrick for what they’re doing

10/04/2026

We have wrapped up our first pass of analysis and commentary on Albany Mayor Dr. Dorcey Applyrs' 2027 Proposed Budget.

We have posted two pdfs in a Google Drive folder:

1. "Albany 2027 Budget Review.pdf" this is a narrative review of the budget

2. "2027 Proposed Budget Book - ADS_Comments.pdf" this is a copy of the budget book where we made around 160 comments on the budget pdf. You may have to play around with whatever tool you use to view pdfs to fully see the comments (likely a mobile phone viewer won't work well)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pSQvg4WMmr9DdusgW2MEE7L2HSGZE9TO?usp=drive_link

As we note in the summary of the narrative document:

"Albany's 2027 proposed budget is not a serious piece of work that is aligned with the gravity of our City's finances. Our City needs a budget that lays out a set of difficult decisions that will begin to stabilize our City's finances; the 2027 proposed budget fails to accomplish that. We have identified 15 themes in the budget, where each theme represents concerning shortcomings related to the assumptions, decisions, risks and communication associated with our City's revenues and expenditures.

In addition, we are concerned in the overconfidence in the budget from those who produced the budget. Initial communications from the Administration suggest that this budget only needs polishing and shaping through a listening period and coordination with the Common Council. Put another way, it appears as if the creators of this budget think it is a good budget; they are wrong. Any attempt to use this budget as a foundation for 2027 decision-making would put the City at further financial risk.

From our analysis we would recommend that this budget sees a complete rework by a task force of people who understand budgeting and who are able to balance and make the hard decisions that our City needs. This complete rework would have as its major tasks a) to throw out the improbable schemes that the budget is relying on for revenue generation, b) to make tough decisions on reducing expenditures which are not present in this budget, and c) to communicate these decisions in an effective manner to the citizens and employees of the City."

There is a lot of content in these documents. If you have questions, comments, criticisms, etc... please feel free to share them. We also recognize that this is our view, based on our analysis. Other people will have different points of view and that's great. We need many people to shape this budget and its decisions

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