The Mayor Reports on 2025
Vol. III, No. 220 - The Mayor's Annual Report Doesn't Look Ahead
The Mayor’s 2025 annual report checks the legal box the state requires, but it still does not give Troy a clear picture of where we are going as a city in 2026. Instead of a roadmap, residents get a year-end highlight reel that skips over many of the hard questions our community keeps asking.
Much like the 2024 report, this year’s edition is a classic exercise of civic boosterism as it paints a cheerful picture. It talks about how “wonderful” the year was, praises city staff, and runs through a long list of projects, events, ribbon cuttings, and meetings. The story is simple: Troy is busy, thriving, and attractive to residents, businesses, and visitors — though there is no empiricial data to back these claims. What we do not see is a clear explanation of the city’s biggest problems, what the plan is to fix them, and how anyone will be able to tell if progress is actually being made.
Much of the report focuses on activity. It describes infrastructure projects, park work, utility upgrades, community festivals and concerts, and the many boards and committees where the Mayor “represents” Troy.
All of that may be useful context, and these efforts matter to daily civic life, but they are presented as an end in themselves rather than as steps in a longer journey. Residents are told what was done, but not how those actions fit into a bigger plan for the city’s future.
What is missing is just as important as what is included. The report offers little to no discussion of workforce housing, better transportation and transit, or child care access, even though these issues were highlighted a few years ago in the Troy Foundation’s Community Needs Assessment and still keep too many people out of the workforce.
It also does not grapple with hard local realities that people see every day, such as the ever increasing number of empty storefronts downtown or a large number of homeless individuals. A vision for the future is largely absent, and there are almost no simple, measurable goals residents can use to judge how the city is performing.
As Troy steps into 2026, the annual report should be more than a civic scrapbook of last year’s events. It should help answer some basic questions in plain language: Where are we right now as a community? Where do we want to be in five or ten years? What are the top problems we must solve to get there, and how will we know if we are on track? Instead, the report feels more like a yearbook. It celebrates a busy calendar but does not connect today’s projects to a larger vision that tackles housing, jobs, transportation, child care, and the health of our downtown.
As a statutory city, the Mayor is required by state law to produce this report, but that legal duty should be the floor, not the ceiling. Residents deserve an annual report that lays out some vision for the city to achieve, sets simple and public goals for improvement, and explains, in everyday terms, what the city will do in the coming year, who is responsible, and how progress will be reported back.
If Troy’s leadership is willing to move from a feel-good highlight reel to an honest, goal-driven story, the annual report could finally become what the community needs: not just a polished snapshot of another “wonderful” year, but a working guide to real, measurable change.
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