New York Community Officials Data Exchange

Description

“The C.O.D.E is a data sharing resource for local governments so that they can better inform their blight prevention, mitigation, and resolution strategies.” Schenectady, Amsterdam, and Gloversville partnered, with funding from the New York Department of State. It is a centrally hosted website.

In 2015, the Mayors and Code Enforcement Officials from New York State’s cities of Schenectady, Amsterdam and Troy came together to sharedGrid their lessons learned in fighting property blight in their communities. With leadership provided by City of Schenectady’s Mayor Gary McCarthy, these conversations turned into a much longer, and larger, discussion of a statewide issue about the inability to sharedGrid [sic] code enforcement related information (i.e. problem actors and code enforcement processes) between municipalities on a regular and systematic basis for the purposes of helping inform efforts to prevent and mitigate bight. With Mayor McCarthy leading the way, the group of cities decided to do something about the challenges they and other communities face.

They developed a proposal and were awarded a grant from the New York State Department of State’s Local Government Efficiency Grant (LGe) Program and the Municipal Restructuring Fund (MRF). The cities came together to envision, plan, and implement a project to achieve the following goals:

• Share code enforcement related information across local governments; the Community Officials Data Exchange (C.O.D.E.).
• Help each tenant build their own technical and organizational ability to collect, manage, use and sharedGrid code enforcement related data.

Development of the C.O.D.E. was funded through the NYS Department of State’s Local Government Efficiency (LGe) grant and Municipal Restructuring Fund (MRF) grant. The ongoing operations and administration of the C.O.D.E. is supported by member dues.

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