With $11.3 million in payments recorded, Callanan Industries, a supplier of paving materials and construction services, was the highest-paid vendor to contract with Ulster County over the last two years (between January 1, 2022 and October 31, 2024).
The highest-paid non-profit vendor to contract with Ulster County, netting $9.4 million, was Gateway Hudson Valley, a social-service agency providing services to people with disabilities, behavioral-health needs and the aging population.
What a government chooses to spend its money on and how much it spends can speak volumes about its priorities, but keeping track of both through committee meetings and legislative votes can be an arduous and time-consuming process.
Enter a new contract-and-vendor dashboard launched by the county comptroller’s office on November 12, which aims to offer immediate gratification to the curious citizen by putting all that information — names, dates and amounts — in one place on the Internet for the public to inspect.
“We attached every single contract to it,” said county comptroller March Gallagher, “and you know, it’s a lot of contracts. Over two thousand. I am so proud of the work our team has done to bring these thousands of contracts and tens of thousands of payments into public view.”
Utilizing numbers and bar graphs to display information, the data base describes the details surrounding the $550 million paid out to 2411 vendors. Visitors may inspect contract payments disbursed as well as descriptions of any amendments which have changed contract language. The original contract document itself is also available for viewing through a link embedded on the page.
Initially, her office was uncertain about which software to use, says Gallagher. They settled on a platform already familiar to office staff. “We decided to stick with Power BI, which we had used for the [county payroll] dashboard. It’s a Microsoft tool,” Gallagher explained. “It’s a way to share extremely large data sets.”
Another public-facing dashboard built on the same software was released last summer by the comptroller’s office to track county payroll numbers.
Both dashboards were developed in-house over the course of a year by Alaina Voulgaropoulos, hired by the comptroller’s office as a quality analyst. She was responsible for designing, coding and formatting the dashboards.
“Our auditors here helped go through the data and all the numbers to verify that they were accurate,” said Voulgaropoulos, “and we released it.”
Power BI is the same data visualization software used by the state unified court system to provide tenant eviction numbers and to the office of court administration to catalog felonies and misdemeanors arraignments by county.
Gallagher says the cost for the licensing was less than $1000. The comptroller’s operation is a bargain compared to the county’s public-facing dashboard, which keeps track of short-term rentals across Ulster County. That dashboard has so far cost taxpayers over a half-million dollars.
Voulgaropoulos noted that state comptroller Tom DiNapoli recently issued a report telling Dutchess County that for ease of review all contracts needed to be attached to invoices.
Missing from the new Ulster County dashboard are uploaded documents related to the bid process. “And so we’re going to have a really big push for that,” Voulgaropoulos said. “And this is just one aspect of that push.”
It took Ulster County a year to get to where it is now.
“That’s something we’re maybe hoping to do in the future,” Voulgaropoulos said. “So the bids were a whole other ocean to dive into — and we’re just trying to get a handle on this one.”
Until then, Gallagher said, residents curious to get a look at contract language or bidding documents not yet on the dashboard must use the Freedom Of Information Law (FOIL). “You can FOIL the purchasing department for that information,” said Gallagher. “Those packets that go before the Ways and Means Committee, they contain every contract that’s being considered. Those packets can be twelve to fifteen hundred pages long.”
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