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Powers Table

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Views in this tool: Powers overview Powers Table Law Explorer Methodology
data.nycuriosity.com › NYC Council Legislation Trackers › Powers Tracker › Powers Table
Powers Tracker

The authority local laws hand to city agencies, kept apart from what they must do

Each row is a power a local law enacted since 2014 grants a city agency: to inspect, write rules, charge a fee, or impose a penalty. A power has no deadline, because an agency uses it when it chooses to. What agencies are required to deliver is in the obligations table, and the methodology explains how each record is sorted.

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–agencies –laws granting powers

Law Agency Power granted Type Committee Prime sponsor Enacted

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Created by Tal Roded · NYCuriosity · Source: Author's analysis of enacted local law text from NYC Legistar

What counts as a power: authority a local law gives a city agency, office, or officer to act if it chooses to, granted with "may", "is authorized to", "is empowered to", or "shall have the power to". A provision that also requires the agency to do something counts as a duty and appears in the obligations table.

Extraction and verification: powers are extracted from the enacted legislation text on NYC Legistar using Claude, and every quoted passage is mechanically checked against the law text. Rows whose quote could not be verified verbatim are marked in the row detail. Check a record against the law text before relying on it.

Coverage by enactment date: until the October 2026 refresh, extraction was instructed to skip most permissive language, so the laws extracted before then are missing some of the powers they grant. Every law extracted from that refresh onward is read for all of its powers. See the methodology for the sorting rule that separates powers from duties.

Agency names: normalized with the NYC Agencies and Governance Organizations dataset (NYC Open Data), so "DOT", "Dept of Transportation", and "Department of Transportation" resolve to one agency.