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.
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.
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”.
I think we need a constitutional amendment that prohibits all levels of government from charging user fees.💰
By banning user fees, then government would get out of the business of providing services best offered by the private sector. Without user fees, all services offered by the government would be free and available to the public without discrimination.
Private corporations should be in the business of selling products and services. The government in contrast should be in the business of serving the people.
Honestly, I think if you feel the need to call yourself honorable then I think your a dishonorable person. 🤔
Government service isn’t honorable, putting food on your family’s table and providing for your household needs without a government hand out is honorable. If government work is how you do it, then God Bless, but don’t call yourself an honorable person just because your a government bureaucrat.
I am kind of a sucker when it comes to clicking on scammy internet businesses. I like reading up about them, taking a little of their ad dollars and educating myself on how they work. As a big consumer of the news and podcasts, I’m particularly interested in products and services marketed to the poor and how they compare to what is available to us in the Middle Class.
A few weeks ago I started seeing advertising for Easy Prison Transport, a local business that uses old city school buses to transport loved ones without cars to state prisons for visitation hours. For $100, you can buy a ticket for a Saturday day trip to Clinton Correctional in Dannemora, 15 miles west of Plattsburgh or Bare Hill Correctional outside of Malone, a few miles south of the Canadian border. On Sundays they offer $60 trips to Greene Correctional in Coxsackie and Hudson Correctional just outside Hudson.
I am sure these services are mostly used by wives and children of the colored and poor who want to visit their loved ones every once in a rare while. $100 bucks isn’t that much money these days, but if you’re poor and making minimum wage it might be a whole day’s labor. You have to figure only the poorest of poor people use these services – most other people would probably just drive their cars to visit the prison.
It has to be quite a trip. The buses leave at 4:30 am and are old school buses that rumble through the Adirondacks to their destination, on buses packed with people of common cause. Must be some very somber discussion.
It’s a very scenic trip, the mountains scenery of the Adirondack Northway and the somewhat pungent farm country of the Lake Champlain flatlands of Plattsburgh and the vast timberlands and less rich farm and grazing country up around Dannemora and Massena. The rundown trailers and mobile homes, the junk cars and broke down tractors and goats and cows in rocky pastures.
To be sure, many of the people behind bars are there for serious reasons. Most of these prisons are maximum or at least medium security. The people behind bars are often convicted of very serious crimes that have others seriously injured and disfigured, often for life, or dead. Other people are behind bars long periods of time for much more dubious reasons – things totally legal in one state but banned in another – often for purposes of stroking a political ego. Laws on the possession of firearms and so called illicit drugs often fall into that category.
Why do people make this costly trip to prisons for visitation purposes? For a few hours sitting across plexiglass to talk into a phone but see the face of loved ones behind bars? Love. It has to be quite the trip.
The other day half jokingly I noted on Facebook I didn’t want to leave my truck parked in the city with the stuff I needed for camp on a ninety degree day – with the propane tank, fireworks, ammunition and even the second battery sitting in the heat potentially posing a fire or explosion risk. I apparently watch too many cartoons or take the printed propane and battery warnings too seriously but I’d be unhappy if my truck burned. That said I was even more concerned about the heat decimating the ice I had to keep food prematurely.
Some random person that follows my personal Facebook feed commented that, that’s the kind of thing that gets you put on the government’s terrorists watch list. About the same time, reading the news for work, I saw this article about the Buffalo FBI surveillance of domestic terrorists and mass shooting threats. They mentioned that they had a unit that surveilled people of interest. That said, I was pretty bemused by the whole thing, noting that at least I’m creating good paying government jobs and the federal government has some of the best paid jobs in the Capital Region.
I’m really not that worried about government surveillance. If there is somebody in the government who sits around reading my blog posts and tries to psychoanalysis them, I’m glad I’m helping to keep them employed. I hope they enjoy watching my camping videos, stories about Big Red, my maps, photos and other content I provide. That said, more likely, they’re just read by an automatic spider run by the government like a Google, processed into some kind of intelligence like millions of other pages but ultimately not that useful. With 325 million Americans to keep an eye on plus six billion other foreign actors I’m sure I’m not that much of a priority or interest.
Sure as a staunchly independent individual, a single guy, who likes spending weekends in the wilderness, owns a few guns, are part of several pepper and off grid Facebook groups, plead to a misdemeanor a decade and a half ago, who has some conservative and some liberal views, I’m probably not the lowest of priorities by law enforcement monitoring. But I’m also not the highest either, and there are a lot more dangerous people out there like White Nationalists, religious extremists, racists and other hate groups. I’m certainly none of those things and there is a lot bigger fish to go after then me.
I also am aware that law enforcement has a lot of restrictions on monitoring citizens. Most monitoring when it occurs is probably broad-based and occurs on a lot swath of population and is fully automated. They have to have reasonable suspension that a crime is likely to occur in the near future and can only monitor people in public places or public utterances without a court order obtained by a judge after showing probable cause of a crime. Because of the cost and time involved, only when they have compelling evidence are law enforcement likely to investigate.
I keep seeing these articles about how Russian oligarchs can’t have their assets siezed without due process, in a process that rarely ends with actual forfeiture.
Probably because they are not colored or poor. 🇷🇺
The government has no problem with seizing the assets of people of color and the poor. Cops are more than happy to sieze the assets of blacks, because they are supposedly drug dealers under civil forfeiture and because they often don’t have lawyers or any other way to fight the evils of the state. Moreover many fees levied by both the government and the private sector go directly after the poor and people of color. Thats just the truth of the matter.
