← nycuriosity/data

Obligations Tracker

About Support my work
Views in this tool: Obligations overview Obligations Table Agency Workload Deadline Timeline Law Explorer Methodology
data.nycuriosity.com › NYC Council Legislation Trackers › Obligations Tracker
Obligations Tracker July 2026

Every new local law is a to-do list for city agencies

When the Council enacts a local law, NYC agencies inherit the work: rules to write, reports to deliver, programs to stand up, deadlines to hit. This tracker reads the enacted text of every local law since 2014 and extracts each required agency action, with the responsible agency, the deliverable, the deadline, and the exact statutory language behind it. Every quoted passage is mechanically checked against the law text on NYC Legistar.

Member tools: Ask the Trackers, alerts, briefs, watchlist

Featured in The City Reporter, Vital City, and Citizens Union’s Searchlight (Aug 2026)

2,171 Local laws covered (2014 to present)
8,290 Agency obligations extracted
106 Agencies with at least one obligation
–Deadlines in the next 12 months

Views in this tool

Table
Every Obligation, One Table
The master list: every extracted agency action with its law, deliverable type, deadline, and recurrence. Filter by agency, type, deadline year, or search the text. Click a row for the statutory language.
filterable · sortable Explore →
Bar Chart
Which Agencies Carry the Load
Obligations ranked by responsible agency, broken down by deliverable type: rules, reports, programs, outreach. Filter by committee, sponsor, or enactment year to see who assigns work to whom.
ranked · filterable Explore →
Timeline
What Is Due, and When
The oversight view: statutory deadlines in chronological order, past due and upcoming, plus the recurring duties that never expire. The starting point for asking an agency where its report is.
chronological Explore →
Law Explorer
One Law, Its Full Checklist
Pick any local law and see its implementation checklist: every agency action it requires, in one place, with effective dates and Legistar links. The dashboard the law itself never came with.
per-law view Explore →
Methodology
How the Tracker Reads the Law
Where the text comes from, what counts as an obligation, how every quote is mechanically verified, how deadlines are computed, and how agency names are normalized and resolved.
sources · rules · limitations Read →

The tracker at a glance

The top 10 agencies carry 55% of the Council's duties matched to an agency

Obligations by responsible agency, top 12.

Mayor's Office
989
DOHMH
580
DOB
542
DOT
430
DCWP
413
HPD
380
DOC
331
Citywide (all agencies)
299
NYCPS
271
NYPD
256
DOF
238
DSS
238

Reports are the Council's most common demand

Obligations by deliverable type.

report
1,482
other
1,348
notice or posting
883
database or data publication
873
program or service
679
outreach or education
584
rulemaking
574
designation or staffing
464
enforcement or inspection
423
study or audit
311
plan or strategy
263
training
154
monitoring or testing
126

The Council asks far more of agencies than it did in 2014

Obligations created per year, by law enactment date.

163
'14
421
'15
793
'16
907
'17
665
'18
853
'19
380
'20
855
'21
489
'22
718
'23
606
'24
753
'25
676
'26
Grouped by the year in which each law was enacted. 2026 is still filling in.

Who writes the to-do lists

Obligations by the prime sponsor of the underlying law, top 10.

Daniel Dromm
285
Costa G. Constantinides
272
Corey D. Johnson
261
Helen K. Rosenthal
260
Margaret S. Chin
253
Ben Kallos
238
Pierina Ana Sanchez
237
Melissa Mark-Viverito
224
Ritchie J. Torres
198
Stephen T. Levin
195

Source: Author's analysis of enacted local law text from NYC Legistar. Agency names normalized with the NYC Agencies and Governance Organizations dataset.