Nearly every community in New York State has at least some federal government workers although some communities have many more then others. As it's a partial government shutdown, not all federal employees are unpaid but many are.
Data Source: S2408, CLASS OF WORKER BY SEX FOR THE CIVILIAN EMPLOYED POPULATION 16 YEARS AND OVER. 2013-2017 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates. American Fact Finder, US Census Bureau. https://factfinder.census.gov/
Interactive maps with backcountry and roadside camping: New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia & Vermont.
List of NYS DEC Lean-Tos with map coordinates. List of NYS DEC Firetowers with map coordinates and more information.
Google Spreadsheet with Roadside, Primitive and Pay Campsites
Explore the Finger Lakes Trail, Long Path, Northville-Placid Trail and Long Trail/Appalachian in Vermont.
Catskill Park Mountain Peaks, Hudson Valley & Long Island Peaks, Peaks Over 3000 ft Elevation, Highest Peaks in Adirondacks, Interactive Map of All Named Summits in NYS, Blaze Colors in Catskill Park, Trailhead Parking Coordinates and Addresses in the Catskills.
Browse USGS Topo Quads as PDF 🆕 by State Lands or County. You can Bulk Download New & Old USGS Topograpic Maps.
Links to various NY State Land Websites 🆕. Get latest GIS Data from state Web Services.
Moose River Plains – Campsite Listing, Maps and photos of state’s largest free camping area.
Piseco-Powley Road – Campsite Listing, Maps and photos of 15 mile dirt road with camping.
Catskill Park Primitive Campsites – An overview of free camping locations in Catskill Park.
Burnt-Rossman Forest, Cattaraugus County, East Branch Sacandaga River, Finger Lakes National Forest, Madison County, Pennsylvania, Vermont and West Virigina.
Campsite Coordinates for Bog River Flow / Lows Lake, Hudson River SMA (Buttermilk Falls), Lake Lila, Oswegathie River, Nine-Corner Lake, Pharaoh Lake Wilderness, Saranac River Campsites, Stillwater Lake, Schoharie County, and Sugar Hill State Forest.
Overview of Camping Areas in the Catskills, Green Mountains, Southern Adirondacks, Central Adirondacks, Northern Adirondacks, Allegheny National Forest and Penna. DCNR Motorized Campsites and the Monongahela National Forest West Virginia.
Free Campsite Overview Maps: Adirondack – North Country, Catskills, Central NY, Finger Lakes, Western NY. Interactive Map.
Places I camped in 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020.
Bicycle Trails and “Blackie” My Mountain Bike 
Finally bought a mountain bike, after chewing over a mountain vs commuter bike. Really enjoying riding my bike to work and when it rains there is always a bike rack to safely take it back home. One way to get to adventures at Thacher Park is the Nature Bus.
Empire Trail – KMZ and Interactive Map. Parking along it.
More Trailways with KMZ files including the Albany County Rail Trail, Black Diamond Trail, Catharine Valley Trail, Catskill Scenic Trail, Fonda, Johnstown & Gloversville Rail Trail, Genesee Valley Trail, Link Trail.
Wildlife Management Units (Deer) – KMZ Map shows the WMU boundaries.
Summer 2019 Aerial Photographs of WMUs
KMZ Maps of Deer Harvest Density by Town: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016. By WMU 2017, 2016, 2015.
KMZ Maps of Buck Harvest Density by Town: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016. By WMU 2017, 2016
2016 -2019 Deer and Buck Harvest by Town – KMZ Spreadsheet with FIPS codes for making your own calculations.
Parking and Access to Trout Streams – An interactive, downloadable KMZ Map.
Lakes with DEC Contour Maps – A KMZ Map links to Contour Maps for Fishing.
State Truck Trails Over A Half Mile – Dirt roads to explore in the backcountry.
NYS Statewide Snowmobile Trail System – State trails on public and private lands.
Interactive Maps of NY Census – Explore and download KML files.
Charts and Interactive Diagrams – From population to pollution control.
Andy Arthur GitHub – Git my R and Python scripts used to make maps and diagrams.
Use ArcPullR to Get Geospatial Data – Super easy way to connect to get GIS data in R from government servers.
GDAL Opens E00 Files – Most open source programs nowadays can open common geospatial formats.
NY Building Footprints – Where to find on the internet for making maps.
WMS and ArcMap Services – Downloadable CSV file listing services used on the blog.
2022 US Census Population Estimates – Red states, south continue to gain population.
2020 Cartogram of State Population
Properties in Albany Pine Bush Study Area, Excel Files: Various Tax Rolls, Find coordinates and political districts, Look Up State Tax Records and a Script for Processing RPTL 1520 PDFs. Match NY SWIS Codes to FIPS Codes and GEOID
Big Red – Photos and Videos of my lifted truck with its camper shell. Big Red’s Dual Battery Setup for Camp Power, Video Tour and Diagram. Big Red is getting old. What is next? I’ve thought about going carless for a while to save money and reduce pollution. Or maybe going bigger? Or smaller? Five dollar gas sucks.
I am seriously thinking about building an off-grid house. I have a first draft. I need to learn CAD! I have a road map towards buying land and building. I concede might have to live with long commute and give up traveling and camping. I need to be strong.
Why off grid? Well, I’m not into contemporary society. I want to own land, but not be called a landowner, and a cabin, not hooked to electrical grid, farm, raise pigs for food and burn my own trash. I’m saving for a better tomorrow, hoping to make the leap to another freer state. Having acreage is important. Cornfields aren’t bad neighbors. Maybe though my vision has grown smaller and more local. More on off-grid living.
I am 16 years into my career and have made some significant progress in my life. I love my job. But I do wonder on all the things I’m missing out but saving sure makes me high. Maybe it will be different when I own my own land — the end of goal of all this saving.
2020 into 2021 during the pandemic was a year of remote work. It was a struggle not having internet at home, worked a lot out of my truck. But I worked remotely from Horseshoe Lake which was super cool.
Generally I like the idea of owning land in a red state, particularly Idaho, Iowa, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Wisconsin — and Midwest more generally. But I may settle for New York – it’s all about the f-ing money!
I use open source software and public sources of data for the blog. Quantum GIS (QGIS), GDAL/ogr2ogr, PyQGIS, GeoPANDAS, R Studio and Leaflet for map making, Arduino and ESP32 microprocessors, Ubuntu Linux and XFCE Window Manager. I’ve recently gotten interested in machine learning.
I avoid using commercial software like Microsoft Windows and do not have home internet or television. If you don’t use commercial software and use your brain, fears of computer viruses are overblown. I deleted most of my social media accounts.
Creating Digital Surface Models using LiDAR Point Clouds.
R Statistical Programming 
The R programming language and RStudio are powerful tools for statistical analysis, making maps and charts. Many of the blog posts and analysis I do are in R, ggplot not only makes great charts but also maps using tidycensus. Generally, R is better then Python for geospatial work.
Use IDW Interpolation to fill in missing Census data, Zonal Histograms for land cover, load WMS Aerial Photography in R, find mountain peaks, save Census shapefiles using tigris quickly, pull NY Election Night Results using Selenium. Fast reverse Geocoding in PostGIS. Working with PDFs in R. Fix a common error starting rselenium/wdman. Make data-filled calendars. R is wonderful and weird, learn it!
Python and Pandas 
Querying state property database, political enrollments, PL 94-171 Census files, calculating population statistics, what address is a district in, converting old districts to new districts, Shapefiles missing Projection information in QGIS.
Learn to code for free modern HTML, Javascript, Python and SQL at freeCodeCamp and web development at the Odin Project.
Politics 
Crunched Election Results with Turnout for Albany County: November 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 and Primaries June 2019, Pres/June 2020, June 2021, June 2022, Aug 2022, June 2023.
Albany County Races converted to the new 2023 EDs using Super EDs and Code: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 and Primaries June 2019, Pres/June 2020, June 2021, June 2022, Aug 2022.
Above Election Results as zipped Excel files.
Albany County Legislature Districts 2024 Maps –
Maps Comparing 2017 and 2023 Albany County Election Districts and a Crosswalk Table Showing the Proposition of Voting Age Population in New and Old EDs
Maps of 2022 NYC Assembly Races, NYS Assembly Races, NY Senate Races, Governor’s Race in Erie County and Statewide. Partisan shift in governor race between 2010 and 2018.
A comparison of Democratic Performance 2022 Assembly Districts to those proposed in 2023 by the IRC. Here is latest 4/20/23 IRC Maps, showing ADP and how they change from existing Assembly districts. Most towns upstate, outside of cities, are quite red. Using LATFOR data with R to calculate Average Democratic Performance.
You can scrape employee salary data from SeeThroughNY using R. Other useful investigative resources.
I often think politics is for losers. I’m into the politics of statistical analysis and reading history books.
I believe strongly in the first amendment, second amendment, oppose gun restrictions and I support de-funding the police in favor of lower-cost technology and civilian employees. Maybe use red flag laws for voting to stop dangerous voters? And the media should stop promoting mass-shootings, even if it’s super profitable for all involved. They should tax the media when it promotes violence. I think some people are much too paranoid in politics. How elections are rigged under law to benefit incumbents. But vote, it’s the best option and inexpensive.
Yeah for the third parties! I voted for Larry Sharpe for Governor and Jo Jergenson for President but my views are complicated and often vote for Democrats, after voting Jill Stein Green Party in 2016.
Generally, I think Biden has been a good change over DJT and glad the Trump era is over and are glad prosecutors and grand jurors are holding him responsible by indicting him for many serious felonies. I don’t think Trump can win in 2024, as nothing has changed politically from 2020.
I think rural people should be left alone and not worship government workers or have parades for them. I am no fan of Donald Trump, his speeches are bad, I don’t like Trump’s embrace of radical environmentalists, but do admire the homemade roadside monuments to DJT.
I don’t toke. But whatever. There are too many transit authorities.
The Earth 
Why I oppose wilderness areas and parks. It’s trendy to be green these days, but is eco-marketing good for the planet? I visited the Mount Storm Coal Plant and Corridor H.
I worry about a lot about overly-aggressive Climate Change Action, and Undermining Environment Laws for Climate Action. I think we should all admit we are Addicted to Fossil Fuels. These days, urban recycling has become a joke, when it’s still an option at all. It’s better to just buy less shit and avoid the alure of Costcos. I really don’t like how aging radicals have become industrial solar salespeople.
Big bucks are coming to state-designated disadvantaged communities under the CLCP. Which counties and political districts are in line for the the most pork? Interactive map.
I’m a big of farmers who are essentially Living Off the Earth and think Rednecks are Noble Savages. Dairy Farming are key to our rural landscape. I’d trust a farmer or a hunter in a pile of guts he’s butchered over any ivory-tower scientist.
Hundreds of multi-acre industrial solar farms are being built in our state. How bad is solar for the environment? We should ask tough questions. Interactive of recently built solar farms, proposed facilities. List of proposed industrial solar facilities. See how the Greenville Solar Farm changed the landscape.
Saving Money 
I am not a fan of ESG Investing as it’s not well diversified. I prefer index-funds and other tax-advantaged ways of saving. Why I am concerned about saving enough for retirement, even though I’m in my late 30s. We as a nation should save more, consume less. I like the idea of carbon tax to replace capital gains taxes to discourage consumption.
Mission Fifty & Being Healthier 
I am now officially in my 40s! I am building to a better life in my 50s, which means getting up early, walking a lot, saying no to cake and yes to more fruit. In many ways, the forties are an awesome time to be alive.
And eating healthy for less without losing sleep over arsenic. And I don’t think we should subsidize unhealthy habits. How I got started in eating healther. Meals are too focused on meat and carbs due to how we describe them, maybe I eat too many bananas in the office, what to eat while camping, worry more about salt then GMOs, eat more beans. Do spend extra for farmers market peaches, especially doughnut peaches and plums. Consider ethnic supermarkets. Thinking about how to make a healthier macaroni and cheese, spinach-mackeral-pasta salad, quick-cook biscuits and whole-wheat bread. That said, too many recipes are junk food crap. Okay in moderation is not okay. The fact that I’m thinner is not a sign I’m dying.
A few years back I decided to explore my mental illness with therapy, thinking about why I have so much anxiety and how many of my values are rational or just thinking too much rednecks’ burn barrels and how much of a throwaway society we live in. Do I want to change?
I’ve learned to care less about the world, and focus more on myself. Maybe I am happier as I am now, saving and investing a lot towards owning my own land, where I don’t have to deal with all the bullshit of modern life.
Mission Fifty: Getting to the point where I own my own land. 
Healthy Eating / Growing My Wealth
Healthy Thoughts 
/ Enjoying Life 
Questions, comments? Feel free to email me at andy@andyarthur.org.
I use GNU open source software.
Plus I like buck goats,
because they’re real macho men
spraying their beards with goat urine.
Laugh a bit and learn how your data is used on this blog: Privacy Policy
This blog is © Copyright 1997-2023 Andy Arthur.org, please share using the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Think about it for a minute. Any bus rider who wants to ride the bus, under this rendering of the proposal will be forced to walk 500 feet with no shelter to their office building in the State Office Campus. If you not going to drive, the least you would expect would be the bus to drop you off in front of your office — especially if you’re a middle class person who works for government and can afford an automobile.
Not only would such proposal make you walk, but if it’s raining out, you would get quite wet. There are no provisions for a roof over the sidewalk from the bus stop — 500 feet in the pouring rain. If you’re a professional who wears a suit to work, good luck not ruining it on your daily bus commute.
This picture suggests that one would have to cross not only the Busway to get to work, but the inner-loop of the State Office Campus. Look both ways, and maybe if the drivers are feeling very nice, maybe they will stop for you. But don’t bet on it! Run quickly, and buy yourself a good life insurance policy.
Most Middle-Class State Workers live in the suburbs, such as Clifton Park or Delmar. A bus that heads from Crossgates Mall to the State Office Campus — or worst from Downtown to the State Office Campus won’t help them out much at all, besides drinking up their taxpayer dollars.
It might make sense to speed buses up along Western Avenue by running them along one of the underused Ring Roads — possibly dedicated exclusively to bus use. Most of the traffic on the Route 10 bus goes between colleges, so avoiding some traffic lights might make sense. Or maybe the bus should just follow the existing State Office Campus Roads, with a simpler and cheaper connector to the University of Albany.
But it’s silly to build a bus station in the middle of nowhere that nobody is ever going to use, and claim your including the State Office Campus in your routing, when all your doing is driving through it to save time. If you want to improve transit, send more buses at an affordable rate to places where people actually live or park and ride to, rather than bus stop that will never be used.
I had to laugh when I saw the proposed routing for the new BusPlus at the State Office Campus.
It’s a popular thing to complain about the Empire State Plaza, and say the 1960s “modern” office complex in Downtown Albany is out of place or was overly destructive to the city. But was there really much of an alternative to building the Empire State Plaza? Could the state have just put up conventional office buildings along city streets in vacant lots?
But the reality is Nelson Rockefeller helped slow and ultimately reverse the decline of Downtown of Albany. By the early 1960s, state government was leaving downtown, as witnessed by the construction of the then modern W. Averell Harriman State Office Campus on lands of a former golf course on the outskirts of the city.
The W. Averell Harriman State Office Campus was a perfect example of what many people saw as the future — an office campus where commuters came in their private automobiles via a series of ring roads where there were no stop lights — just ramps and merge lanes. At the W. Averell Harriman State Campus there was ample parking for the cars that most middle-class state workers possessed, and wanted to use to get back and forth to work.
Downtown was the opposite. There was few parking opportunities around the downtown office buildings. Traffic congestion was heavy, and commuters were forced to stop at every traffic light. There was no smooth flowing traffic, as even express traffic going in and around the city was forced to take city streets. Commuters who worked downtown, and the many people who came to the Capitol, didn’t want to have to fight traffic or spend hours looking for a parking spot — especially when such a convenient and sensible alternative as the W. Averell Harriman State Office Campus.
Nelson Rockefeller in many ways was visionary. He argued that State Government could build a modern, suburban style office campus, with limited access, stop light free convenience, and parking lot parking, in the middle of a dense city. Parking would be hidden in an underground garage at the Empire State Plaza, and connected to an Expressway system, that by using bridges would allow cars to “fly-over” city streets.
There are those who say the state could have instead built a series of tower buildings along vacant lots on State Street and other locations. Parking garages could be built behind the office buildings. That is how it was done in later years, often decades after the Empire Plaza was built. But that ignores the competition that the Empire Plaza was up against in it’s early years — the W. Averell Harriman, with it’s suburban ring-road, and traffic-light free commuting, and acres of easy parking.
The state could have chosen to abandon downtown Albany in the early 1960s. After the Governor’s Mansion burned in 1963, it was proposed that it be moved to the W. Averell Harriman State Office Campus. Likewise, had the W. Averell Harriman campus been fully built out, many if not most of the offices in downtown, would have been moved to campus — rather then investing in downtown, and bringing thousands of state workers downtown every day.
Usually when I want to research a New York organization I start at NY Open Government, which is a website put out by the NY Attorney General and brings together several open datasets.
One way to find people’s addresses is to find them in the voter file. Voter Ref contains the voter files for several states, which can be handy for looking up people’s addresses, date of birth, party registration.
You can confirm the latest information on people’s voting registration and address by using the state board of election’s voter lookup. You will need their county, date of birth and zip code which you can get from Voter Ref.
See Through NY has listings of many though not all government employees, which can be useful when you are trying to find information on government workers. No addresses here, but you can find salaries and who people work for in government. If you need bulk data, I wrote a scraping script.
Another good way to gleam people’s addresses and the candidates they search is NYS Campaign Finance Search. If you think somebody might work for a candidate or campaign, you can search the campaign expenses section.
The FEC Campaign Search includes a contributor’s address and reported employer, which can provide useful information.
Every county in New York State is required to post their tax rolls to their website. Tax rolls can be usually found by searching on Google: “XXXX County Tax Rolls” without the quotes. Not only can you find all of the properties owned by a person that way, you can find their address, assessed value and other information. Often the county tax rolls include information on tax exemptions, such as the Guilderland Solar Exemption and Veterans STAR Reduction, which can help you find people who have solar on their homes or are Veterans. I wrote a script to convert the PDFs into Excel spreadsheets.
If you need to search a whole county or the even the state, you will want to get the full roll from NYS GIS. You don’t need mapping or GIS software to use the Shapefiles — Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice can natively open .DBF which contain the data tables. NYS GIS offers selected countys tax-maps as a Shapefile or GeoPackage too.
NYS GIS Parcels Program: https://gis.ny.gov/parcels/
NYS GIS Tax Parcels Centroid Points: gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=1300
In addition, most counties offer their tax maps as ArcGIS REST/Services that can be used in a GIS Program like QGIS. You can find them by searching on Google: “XXX County “REST/Services” parcel”.
How to download ArcGIS Rest/Services as KML Google Maps File: mappingsupport.com/p2/kmz_demo/How_to_download_arcgis_data_as_kmz.pdf
ArcPuller is a Great Way to Get this Data in R: andyarthur.org/youll-like-arcpullr.html
In addition, Joseph Elfelt maintains a list of many open government REST/Services:
PDF: https://mappingsupport.com/p/surf_gis/list-federal-state-county-
city-GIS-servers.pdf
txt file: https://mappingsupport.com/p/surf_gis/list-federal-state-county-city-GIS-servers.t
xt
csv file: https://mappingsupport.com/p/surf_gis/list-federal-state-county-city-GIS-servers.c
sv
An easier to read version can be found here: https://servers.cartobin.com/state/New%20York
Sometimes it’s useful to find what state contracts people have:
See how local governments like counties and cities send their money:
Many different data sets can be found on data.ny.gov
While he did pretty well when “Republican” Theresa Cook (ala that time Rezsin Adams ran as a “Republican” for county legislature) was running the county clerk’s office, other times he was attacked tooth and nail for his performance as a title searcher for the county, even though he was probably the best title searcher and researcher of deeds and history the county ever had. I came across his lawsuit today drying out his papers along with the numerous exhibits on Albany County corruption and sneaky misdeeds or the Erastus Corning machine and by that time Jim Coyne’s county operations. The Corning machine was only really interested in punishing male dissidents, they couldn’t see in their minds that women could have any influence of politics. Ultimately it was the federal District Court that sided with him and had him reinstated but he fought for years to get the pension credit he deserved going back to the days when he was a consultant for Fort Orange 787 dig. The Fort Orange file got wetter than I thought but we got it apart drying. It will be saved. And while, maybe the history books write differently, certainly it was John Wolcott who helped to take down Jim Coyne through alerting the FBI to Coyne’s crooked deal over the Knickerbocker Arena, although like with Fort Orange and Paul Huey, the credit can’t necessarily be just his own.
And then as I was going through the papers, putting dried ones away I heard a screech and bang, and a car crashed into the traffic light pole at South Swan and Morton Avenue, causing the 100 plus lb traffic light to break free of the wire. The clearly fleeing car then took off leaking what appeared to be coolant. Police showed up, hauled the broken stop light off the road, talked to the neighbors and took off. Not sure what happened to the fleeting crashed car, I was too busy sorting papers. Albany is going downhill rapidly, things were looking up in the city not that long ago. I’m just glad I’ve been taking the bus there rather than driving especially with the neighborhoods getting so rough. I still remember that last time I walked down to Sheridan Hollow to visit John, a firearm rang out as somebody shot out a car window.
While working on John’s papers, I’ve been going through the EIS for a project in Troy and some Pine Bush issues in Guilderland with some tax data and GIS Mapping. People have gotten to know all the amazing things that I can do and I get more and more requests. It seems like everywhere I’m going I’m getting sucked into fights against City Hall everywhere, me with public records and free software, going up against million dollar reports with expensive professional software, internal only data and decades of training and experience. But if we don’t raise questions and fight development then who will? It’s tough as these professionals have big budgets and skills, but if house wife Jane Jacobs could stop Robert Moses, then so can ordinary people like myself. Not going to win every fight but it’s good to raise questions and stop bad development where we can. Even if it’s a pain to the local Bob Moses of today. It’s important we protect open space. Even if it involves some risk to myself and makes me not trust or respect most government workers.
Beyond all those wet and smokey papers and battling City Hall it’s been a crazy week for sure. The legislative session is wrapping up and I’ve been swamped with work, I was going through agendas for work well into the night on Saturday night. It’s been a crush at work and when I’m not in the office most of the time until late I’ve been drying out papers. I did get some bird watching in at Five Rivers Environmental Education Center this morning – saw a red tailed hawk being harassed by a few sparrows on the way out walking out there. I continue to back up, photograph and store important documents electronically in case of a disaster.
And then I’m also finally dealing with some of my own issues in my life. The counseling I’m getting is helping, it seems consistent with the advice I’m reading from trustworthy sources and publications on the internet. But change comes hard especially with bad habits of both negative thinking and repeated thoughts in thinking I’ve had ingrained for two decades now. I’m trying to change but it’s hard. I’m certainly learning a lot, becoming a better person because of counseling.
And I was doing better until the mixed emotions of Mr. Wolcott’s house fire – grief and sense of lostmy work sorting and carefully cataloging documents would be forever lost. But we saved a lot. But the shock and horror of it all, seeing that house in such disarray and burnt – that only a week ago before the fire when I was sorting and filing papers things looked so different. Plus all that stuff going to the Rensselaer landfill to be buried and forever viewed from my downtown office as a dirt and grass covered hill. Fire can be so bad, especially in the urban areas. Then I saw the other side tonight out in the country, the place I grew up. My parents neighbors, the ones who live in trailers and raise pigs and cows, were having a big ol bonfire, drinking beer burning an old couch, mattress and pallets with lots of black smoke. I’m so jealous of their homestead, even if they are what the government calls poor people who live in rundown trailers and barns. Kind of like that film about Appalachia I’ve been watching. But the country life is a life I’ll get to eventually, saving a bit each paycheck.
