Nov. 16, 2011 — Recently, the New York City Independent Budget Office (“IBO”) put together a wealth of materials on staffing at New York City government agencies over the last 30 years. This visualization allows for easy access to those data.
In addition to being able to see a graph of the number of employees in an agency for each year, the visualization also tells you the year in which the agency had its peak number of employees and what that number was. Along with that information, we provide the year with fewest employees (“valley year”) and how much smaller in percentage terms staffing was in the valley year as compared to the peak year. Finally, we provide a percentage comparison between peak year and current year.
You can sort agencies by the biggest difference in staffing from peak year to current year — which, in some cases, is quite dramatic. You can also sort by difference from peak to valley, by size of agency, and alphabetically.
IBO included staffers at an agency regardless of source of funding (for example, whether the staffer is city-funded or federally-funded). Remapping Debate is only reporting on agencies still in existence.
Some agencies have consolidated over time. Thus, we have added a category called “Police Department – All Services” that tracks both civilian and uniformed employees as well as what used to be separate Transit Authority and Housing Authority police forces (the categories of “Police Department - Uniform” and “Police Departmentt - Civilian” do not include Transit Authority and Housing Authority polices forces prior to the 1995 merger).
We have also added a category called “Human Resources – Total” that aggregates employees from the Administration for Children’s Services, Social Services, Homeless Services, and Human Resources Administration and Employment.
We list the Department of Citywide Administrative Services as including the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (an office that became a separate entity in 2011); we also include in Citywide Administrative Services what had until 1997 been the Department of Personnel.
