Role of Government

An Extended Government Shutdown Could Impact My Vacation Plans 🏕

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Most versions of my plans for my October Road – Camping trip involve at least some “dispersed camping” in National Forests and visiting National Forest sites. While I am not planning leaving until October 14th, I know spiteful a Democratic president can be over the temporary lapse of appropriations, forcing closures of many developed recreation sites, including in some cases gating back-country roads, not because they cost the government much money, but to put political pressure on Republicans to adopt a budget they don’t agree with.

Not sure if this is going to be an issue this year, but I could see both sides dragging out their appropriation fight well into October and it might require me to reconsider my plans. One option would be to visit more state forests in the Southern Tier of New York State along with doing the Pennsylvania Pine Creek Rail Trail, another would be to head north, and do a trip to the Tug Hill Plateau and North Country / Massena.

I did camp in back country in the Finger Lakes National Forest during the shutdown in 2013, but it’s not clear if that was explicitly permitted or prohibited. The recreation sites were gated at the National Forest, but it’s rather hard to close off back-country roads that aren’t maintained by the forest service. State parks remained fully open, and while during the week I saw a Schuyler County Deputy and the NYSDEC Officer patrolling the roads to make up for the lack of working forest service rangers, they never stopped or said anything about camping during the government shutdown.

It’s not certain what will happen this year, but I should consider my alternatives.

Entering Forest

Would a special master be appointed should the US not raise it’s debt ceiling?

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Would a special master be appointed should the Congress not raise the debt ceiling?

It’s a thought I’ve had.

If the politicians don’t want to come to an agreement, US debt holders could sue the federal government to ensure timely debt payment. They could have a judge a mandate the federal government make make bond and note-holders whole. If the federal government doesn’t have the funding, then a judge could instill a special master, like from academia to decide which programs should be cut and how to ensure all debt holders are made whole in a timely fashion. 

I am convinced that politicians don’t want to make any tough decisions anymore, and are more likely to just punt the hard things like actual governing to the courts. While some legislators, especially liberals, might loathe giving up power to conservative-minded courts, it seems like most politicians are more focused on their re-election, and would rather punt the hard questions to the courts, so they can go back to passing message bills about abortion, trans-persons and guns so they have lots of red meat to bring back to the base back home. Maintaining a solid credit rating or even running the country takes a backseat to the latest ideological battle put forward by the politicians.

Racket

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Maybe I’ve spent too much time around Albany or maybe I’m too much of a fan of James Howard Kunstler and Phil Ochs but I’m more and more convinced every day…

That much of modern American society is racket with most people trying to steal whatever is not tied down.

Some Useful Investigative Open Data Resources

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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.

NY Open Government: nyopengovernment.com

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.

Voter Ref: voteref.com

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.

NY Voter Lookup: voterlookup.elections.ny.gov

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.

See Through NY: seethroughny.net/payrolls

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.

NYS Campaign Finance Search: publicreporting.elections.ny.gov

The FEC Campaign Search includes a contributor’s address and reported employer, which can provide useful information.

FEC Campaign Search: https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/

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:

NY Open Book Contracts Search: wwe2.osc.state.ny.us/transparency/contracts/contractsearch.cfm

See how local governments like counties and cities send their money:

Local Government Reports: wwe2.osc.state.ny.us/transparency/LocalGov/LocalGovIntro.cfm

Many different data sets can be found on data.ny.gov