Many NY state agencies don’t use fips codes, but their own 6-bit number systems

So their county codes go from Albany (1) through Yates (62). It’s a very memory efficient way of storing the data, especially back in the 1960s.

Which is all fine, except there is no consistency between state agencies. The NYS Board of Elections uses “St. Lawrence” county rather then “Saint Lawrence” county in the sort. So Saint Lawrence County is number 50 rather then number 45 if you were going to spell it out. Though they’re not that concerned about memory, as they store towns and cities as strings, rather then numeric codes.

In contrast, the NYS Health Department for Medicaid and other purposes does it the traditional spelled-out way, Saint Lawrence is county number 45.

Then the NYS DOT uses their own system, that involves two alphabetic characters (16-bits), such as AL for Albany, ER for Erie, SV for Sullivan, SL for Saint Lawrence, etc. Heck of it is, if the DOT used just ordinary FIPS codes, they could store the information in only 7-bits at least in NYS (0-127, as Yates County is FIPS code 123).