Civic Finance

Method, thresholds and sources

What this is

A research lens over official state data for every county, city, town, village, school district, BOCES, fire district and IDA in the 22 counties we follow (Capital Region: Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga, Schenectady, Montgomery, Schoharie, Warren, Washington; Rochester: Monroe, Ontario, Wayne, Livingston, Orleans, Yates, Genesee; Mid-Hudson: Orange, Dutchess, Ulster, Sullivan, Putnam, Columbia, Greene). It shows indicators and peer context. It does not score, grade or rank governments.

Evidence rules

• Budgeted, audited (AFR), OSC FSMS and our own calculations are kept as separate series and labelled. Our figures are never presented as OSC scores.
• Funds are only combined where stated: "operating funds" means all governmental and enterprise funds in OSC's AFR account data except custodial (T*), capital projects (H), general fixed assets (K) and long-term debt (W) groups, excluding interfund transfers, debt proceeds and other uses. The general fund (A) is shown both with and without transfers.
• Missing years are left blank and never interpolated.
• Filing timeliness (FSMS "Not filed", missing AFRs) is reported as filing status and is never treated as fiscal stress.
• Classes are compared only with the same class in the same region. Towns, villages, cities and counties provide different services, so cross-class comparisons are not shown as like-for-like.
• Every figure links to the dataset and year it came from. Peer medians and percentiles are provided with sortable tables. There is no composite score and no numbered ranking.

Flag thresholds

Per capita, per pupil and peers

Per capita uses the Census Bureau Vintage 2025 subcounty estimates (towns and cities as county subdivisions, villages as places, counties as counties). Per pupil uses NYSED PTRC enrollment. Peer medians and percentiles are computed within the same region and class among entities that have the figure. Percentile = share of peers with a lower value.

Crosswalk

OSC municipal codes and NYSED BEDS codes are matched to our entity list (the meeting-transcription manifest and the school-district list) by county, class and normalized name, with documented manual overrides. Fire districts are taken from OSC's data and have no entity in our meeting list. Town filter: villages, fire districts and school districts are grouped under the town recorded in their OSC municipal code (digits 5–8), which is one town even when a district spans several.

Unmatched or partial (14): Town of Green Island (Albany, unmatched); Village of East Rochester (Monroe, unmatched); Town of Palm Tree (Orange, unmatched); Village of Wurtsboro (Sullivan, unmatched); Berkshire Ufsd (Columbia, partial); West Park Ufsd (Ulster, partial); Village of Salem (Washington, unmatched_ours); Village of Attica (Genesee, unmatched_ours); Village of Lyons (Wayne, unmatched_ours); Village of Macedon (Wayne, unmatched_ours); Village of Rushville (Yates, unmatched_ours); Schoharie County Ida (Schoharie, manifest_only); Bethlehem Ida (Albany, manifest_only); Cohoes Ida (Albany, manifest_only).

Meeting context hooks

Profiles link to budget-related meeting documents from the meeting-docs pipeline (read-only: document metadata from its database, and the text it has already extracted, scanned for budget terms such as tentative or adopted budget, tax levy, levy limit, fund balance, bond resolutions and auditor letters) and to budget or audit moments in Meeting Insights transcripts. These are context links only and never feed a number.

Sources

A Worker cron checks every source's Last-Modified/ETag each Monday and re-downloads and re-normalizes only those that changed. OSC audits are refreshed from the first listing page per county. The two FSMS not-filed lists are PDFs and are loaded statically. Last check: 2026-10-11 09:18 UTC.

Known gaps

• NYSED Fiscal Profiles (audited per-pupil spending) are not included: the NYSED server's certificate chain could not be validated from our build environment. Per-pupil figures here are proposed budget ÷ enrollment from the Property Tax Report Card.
• IDAs and BOCES have no series: IDA finances are in OSC's PARIS data (no bulk file), and BOCES are not in the AFR bulk files or the PTRC.
• OSC has not posted a school-district FSMS summary for FY2021.
• FSMS fund balance ratios (Indicator 1) are loaded for FY2023–2025 only.
• Tax cap filings for a fiscal year appear only after the entity files with OSC; budgets still in progress may not show yet.
• Town figures include part-town funds; city and village figures are their own. Fire district per-capita figures are not calculated.