Building a Data-Driven City

Sharon F. Owens took office as Syracuse's 55th mayor at the start of 2026, inheriting a city that had spent nearly a decade building its capacity to collect, map, and act on data. Over the eight years of Ben Walsh's administration, the city's Office of Analytics, Performance & Innovation turned geographic data from a back-office function into working tools: a real-time snowplow map that grew out of paper routes still in use from the 1960s, a Lead Service Line Map released in 2024 that lets residents see which homes are connected by lead pipes, a Look Before You Rent tool launched in 2025 that surfaces a rental property's code-enforcement record before a lease is signed, and an Open Data Portal that opens city datasets to residents, journalists, and researchers. In 2025, the Common Council approved a multi-year enterprise agreement with Esri to expand GIS use across departments.

Owens is not a stranger to any of this. She served as deputy mayor throughout its construction, and she sat for years on Walsh's Surveillance Technology Working Group, the body that reviews powerful tools before the city adopts them. The first technology proposal Owens has described is the creation of a Chief Technology Officer role, intended to centralize oversight across departments that each run their own systems. The position, as she has outlined it, would cover digital services, cybersecurity, and the broader question of how the city uses its infrastructure, data, and technology responsibly. That is a different starting point from the build-first posture of the previous decade. 

The clearest test of that posture is surveillance. Syracuse's police department operates COPS cameras and a set of Flock Safety license plate readers, and the city's experience with the latter has been instructive. The scanners have helped solve serious crimes, but their use also exposed sensitive data on residents' movements to federal immigration agents, and contract terms granted the vendor a lasting right to use the city's data for its own purposes, terms the Surveillance Technology Working Group had explicitly warned against. Owens has acknowledged the trade-off directly, describing surveillance technology as a Catch-22 between public safety and privacy.

She plans to give the city's law department more capacity to scrutinize the fine print of vendor contracts, and corporation counsel is assigning an attorney to track federal executive orders and their implications for technology the city already uses. She is designating Jason Thomas, the city's Director of Analytics and Data Management, to chair the technology working group, and she has said she will discuss with the Common Council president whether councilors should have a larger presence on that review body, so that they are better prepared when a technology comes before them for a vote.

The same logic governs her position on police drones. The department has pressed for a "Drone as First Responder" program, and Owens has endorsed narrow, targeted uses while rejecting deployment at the department's discretion. As she has put it, she is not so much against drones as insistent that a clear policy precede their use. The program, she has said, will not be approved until such a policy exists.

Taken together, these moves describe a different conception of what a data-driven city is for. The tools built under the previous administration mostly pointed outward, giving residents clearer information about rentals, lead pipes, and snow routes. The surveillance systems point the other way, collecting information about residents. Owens' early agenda sits at that seam, and her answer to it is structural: an oversight role, sharper contract review, a broadened review body, and policy preconditions before deployment.

A data-driven city is not complete when the maps are live and the sensors are installed. It is complete when the institutions around them can answer for how they are used. Owens has identified that gap and named concrete steps toward closing it: a Chief Technology Officer to centralize oversight, a law department equipped to read the fine print, a review body with stronger council representation, and a standing refusal to deploy technology before its policy exists. In Syracuse, the work of building a data-driven city has shifted from acquiring capability to governing it, and that shift is the substance of what Owens has set out to do.

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