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Reports Due Every Year

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City Council August 2026

City Agencies Now Owe 871 Reports at Least Once a Year

A report is the Council's favorite deliverable: 1,531 of the tracker's 8,194 obligations are reporting requirements, and 871 of them recur at least annually. Each one is a standing assignment for agency staff. Whether each one still earns its cost is exactly the question New York State's regulatory reset and Stanford RegLab's 50-state research are now asking.

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The Council adds 69 recurring reports a year, and old ones rarely leave
Cumulative report obligations due at least once a year, from NYC local laws enacted 2014–2026.
Reports due at least annually (cumulative)
Created by Tal Roded · NYCuriosity · Source: NYC Council Legistar via the Legislation Implementation Tracker

Who reads them? Stanford RegLab found Maryland's legislature would need 14 weeks just to read the reports its laws require, against a 13-week session, and that 30% of California's ongoing reports may never be filed at all. New York City's Council has no public accounting of which of these 871 reports arrive, get read, or still serve a purpose.

Reports are a real cost. Each one takes staff time from the agency that writes it. Some clearly earn that cost; the point of counting them is that nobody has been checking which ones do.

What's counted: obligations the tracker classifies as reports with an annual cadence (693) or a more frequent one: quarterly (117), semiannual (39), monthly (17), or another within-year schedule (5). One report obligation without an enactment date is excluded. Not counted: reports with an ongoing recurrence but no fixed cadence and reports due less often than yearly (biennial, every N years).

Counts are as enacted: the tracker does not net out reports later repealed, consolidated, or sunset by amendment, and pre-2014 laws are outside the data. The average of 69 new recurring reports a year is the 871 total over the 12.6 years of coverage.

Sources: Author's analysis of NYC Council Legistar law text via the NYCuriosity Legislation Implementation Tracker (data as of August 2026); Stanford RegLab, "How AI is helping states cut through decades of red tape" (July 2026).