Which City Council Members Got the Most Bills Enacted during the 2022-2023 Legislative Session?
A brief look at the 289 local laws from the 2022-2023 session
This is part of the MNY City Council Data Project.
Most bills that get introduced into the New York City Council will not become local laws. But during the 2022-2023 legislative session, 288 bills and 1 charter referendum made it over the finish line and became enacted local laws (for 289 total).
So which City Council members introduced those 288 bills? Let’s take a look.
Notes on data cleaning—what counts as a bill from the 2022-2023 session?
On the surface, it can seem like all you need to do is take all local laws enacted in 2022 and 2023, and analyze that data. But this isn’t correct, because of §37 of the city charter.
Here’s how a bill becomes an enacted local law after the City Council passes it1:
Enacting local laws: once a bill has been approved by the City Council, it goes to the mayor. The mayor has three options:
Sign the bill, in which case it becomes law. (“Signed”)
Veto the bill, in which case it goes back to the Council. The Council may override a veto with a 2/3 vote, rather than the standard majority required for most legislation to get out of the chamber. (“Vetoed”)
Do nothing, in which case the bill becomes law after 30 days, per §37 of the city charter. (“Charter Rule Adopted”)2
Most of our local laws are charter rule adopted, which means they become enacted law 30 days after they’re passed by the Council.
The upshot: there are laws that were passed at the end of the 2018-2021 legislative session, in December 2021, that did not become enacted until January 2022. Local Laws 1 through 54 of 2022 originated in the 2018-2021 session in this way. I do not count these 54 laws in my analysis of the 2022-2023 legislative session.
Similarly, there are laws that were passed at the end of the 2022-2023 legislative session, in December 2023, that did not become enacted until January 2024. Local Laws 1 through 43 of 2024 originated in the 2022-2023 session in this way. I do count these 43 laws in my analysis of the 2022-2023 legislative session.
So the calculation looks like this:
Top-level data points:
9 members had zero enacted laws (member name, district number):
Christopher Marte, 1
Kristin Richardson Jordan, 9
Vickie Paladino, 19
Darlene Mealy, 41
Charles Barron, 42
Kalman Yeger, 44
Ari Kagan, 47
Inna Vernikov, 48
Joseph C. Borelli, 51
Justin L. Brannan (district 43 prior to 2024) had the most enacted laws, at 18.
Keith Powers (district 4) had the second most, at 14.
Julie Menin (district 5), Gale Brewer (district 6), and Diana Ayala (district 8) tied for third, with 13.
The Public Advocate, Jumaane Williams, sponsored 12 bills that were enacted in 2022-2023 (the Public Advocate may introduce bills into the Council, but cannot vote on them).
The voters of New York City approved one (1) City Charter amendment via referendum.
—> Find your City Council District and see how many laws your Councilmember got enacted in from the 2022-2023 session!
Charts!
I’ll end the post with three charts. In order, they are:
A choropleth map that shades City Council districts based on how many enacted local laws from the 2022-2023 session were primarily sponsored by the member from that district.
A searchable, sortable table with the same data as above. The rows are shaded in the same way.
A histogram that shows the frequency of council members passing a certain number of bills (for example, 9 members passed 0 bills).
The histogram!
And here’s a histogram showing how many council members got each amount of bills enacted from the 2022-2023 legislative session (for example: only one person got 18 bills enacted, and 9 people had 0 bills enacted):
New York City Charter, Chapter 2: “Council”, §37: “Local laws; action by mayor.”
(American Legal Publishing).
Excerpt from my post explaining how local laws are created