How Many Reports Does the City Council Require from City Agencies?

Part 2: Reporting Requirements // Is reporting data accurate? // Why does this data need to be accurate? // The Council should look into this, and I'm happy to help.

This is part 2 in a series of posts analyzing the 174 local laws of New York City from 2023, and the New York City Council. The links below will be populated as I release each post.

Part 1: Introduction

👉 Part 2: Reporting Requirements

Part 3: Housing Legislation, and the Council’s Housing Posture

Part 4: Notable New Laws by Subject Matter

Part 5: Legislative Drafting & Legislative Management

Part 6: Resolutions—the Forgotten Enacting Mechanism

Part 7: Concluding Review

Highlights

• The City Council tags laws with a “Report Required” label. 82 local laws from 2023 have this tag.

• The label is applied incorrectly and inconsistently; this makes estimating reporting burdens on city agencies more difficult. It is best treated as a vague floor on reporting requirements.

• The label, even if applied correctly, does not supply good information if your goal is to estimate reporting burdens with any reasonable degree of detail.

• It is important for this information to be correct and high resolution. Reporters, citizens, administrative agency employees, civic data scientists/technologists, and more need it to be when doing their jobs.

• I would love for the City Council’s technology committee to hold a hearing that included questioning about all of this.

What are reporting requirements?

The City Council often passes laws that require an administrative agency (like the Department of Sanitation, or the Department of Parks and Recreation) to issue a report. They can be one-time, recurring, large, or small.

Actors in the NYC political sphere debate whether there are too many reports, whether anyone reads them, which of them are useful, and which are a good use of limited agency staff time and resources.¹ This NY1 piece by Dan Rivoli from October 2023 gives a good overview of that discussion.

If you want to see whether a law requires a report of someone, you can do one of two things: (1) read it and see if there’s a new reporting requirement, or (2) pull it up on Legistar and see if it has a “Report Required” index tag, as circled in red in the image below.

Local Law 1 of 2023

And if you want to see how many laws contain reporting requirements according to specific parameters, you can get those results with an “advanced search” in Legistar. In the image below, I limited the search to the enacted local laws of 2023. Of the 174 laws, Legistar returned 82 with “Report Required.”

“Cool,” you might think, “now I have a rough idea of new reporting requirements added in 2023.”

Not so fast!

What does “Report Required” tell us?

All you actually know is how many laws have a “Report Required” tag attached to them. But what does that tag refer to, in practice? It doesn’t distinguish reports by:

• Frequency: are they required quarterly, weekly, yearly, or just once? Is there a sunset provision for the report?

• Contingency: is the report absolutely required, or only under certain circumstances?

• Net amount: does the report replace an existing report, add a new one, or replace two reports? Does a law require one new report, or more than one?

• Newness: is the report fully new, or is it an amendment or addition to a report that already exists?

• Effort: how much agency staff time and resources will be needed for this report? At a baseline, this could be distinguished by whether an agency needs to assemble information it already has internally, or acquire external/new information.

• Assigned Agency Burden: is the agency being given a new reporting requirement behind on its existing reporting requirements? How far behind?

• Report nature: is the report a study, a plan, or a data presentation? Is it a combination of these? Something else?

• Report recipient: who is receiving the report? The Council? Mayor? Community boards? Borough President? The general internet? Someone else? Are the recipients of an existing report being changed?

What criteria trigger a “Report Required” index tag?

It’s unclear. Although many laws have a report tag that obviously fits, many of them don’t. I’ve pulled eight laws from 2023 to provide examples of the different things that trigger the tag, or not.

Here are laws that have the “Report Required” tag:

• LL57: section 1 of this law requires the Department of Buildings to create education material to distribute to building owners, and to post that educational material on their website.²

• LL85: section 6 of this law requires the Department of Sanitation to expand their annual zero waste report, and to create, distribute, and and post educational materials similar to local law 57.³

• LL86: section 1 of this law contingently requires the Department of Sanitation to issue a report if “…the department determines that the citywide-generated recyclable waste diversion goal…is not feasible despite the best efforts of city government, the department shall report such findings…”

• LL167: this law requires multiple new reports, plans, any one of which, or all of which, trigger the “Report Required” tag.⁴

Here are laws without the “Report Required” tag:

• LL51: this law repeals and replaces section 224.1 of the city charter. In the replacement law, subdivisions n and o say, respectively (emphasis added): “No later than December 1 of each year, the mayor shall submit to the speaker of the council a report, containing, at a minimum…” and “The mayor shall publish online and submit a report to the speaker of the council within 12 months of establishing any alternative standards pursuant to subdivisions c or f, and every three years thereafter.”⁵

• LL65: this law requires the Department of Transportation to produce a traffic study every four years instead of five, and send this report and any resulting report plans to community boards in addition to the mayor and speaker of the council. It also requires a separate, already-extant report to be sent to the speaker of the council and community boards in addition to being posted on the DOT’s website.⁶

• LL154: The Department of Environmental Protection is required to publish a map of all “green roofs” in the city on their website.⁷

• LL163: Requires a new report from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and the online publication of material. It is difficult to see how this avoided getting a “Report Required” tag (emphasis added): “Report. No later than June 1, 2025, and annually thereafter, the department shall submit to the speaker of the council a report summarizing the available data regarding the presence of sickle cell trait and sickle cell disease in the city.”

So what is a “report” anyway?

Is it when an agency collects new information, or consolidates existing information? Is it when an agency “conducts a study” or “makes a plan” to be sent to someone else? Is it when an agency posts something on the internet? Is it something else? The criteria are not clear from the “Report Required” tags on the local laws of 2023.

The City Council’s bill drafting manual says: “Some bills require agencies to report information to the Council, either just once or on a recurring basis. These bills may also require reporting to the Mayor or other elected officials, and may require publication of the report on the reporting agency’s website.”⁸

But every local law comes with a plain language summary from the Council that qualifies the “Report Required” tag with this: “Is a report due to the Council required?” (See image below.) This would seemingly be what is reflected in the “Report Required” tag, but the Council clearly applies the report tag to laws that don’t result in a report being sent to the Council, like Local Law 57 of 2023 mentioned above.

The verdict: it is unclear what, exactly, a “report” is.

Plain language summary for Local Law 1 of 2023

So what?

As I read through the local laws of 2023, it became obvious that the reporting tag wasn’t very useful. It establishes a vague, low-resolution floor on new reporting requirements, but not much else. And if anyone is pulling information directly from the Council via Legistar, they will likely be misled by reporting tags. Bills that obviously require a report do not have them, and what exactly constitutes a report is unclear.

Many people are rightly concerned with city administrative capacity, part of which is monitoring reporting requirements. Agency employees need to keep track of this information to prioritize their work (and higher-ups need to manage all reporting requirements with staffing); reporters, citizens, and civic data scientists need this information to broadly monitor both the City Council and the administrative apparatus. The City Council is not giving them the information they need to do this. Ironically, it almost certainly results in the council members themselves not knowing how many reporting requirements they’ve imposed. The City Council is the first victim of its own bad reporting data.

Lastly: if someone wanted to examine new reporting requirement trends over time, they will find that they can only go back to 2016, which is the first year that index tags (including those for reports) were used consistently.

Research reaching back before 2016 requires a different programmatic or manual review to determine reporting requirements.

My outstanding questions:

• What criteria does something have to meet to be defined as a “report”?

• Who, specifically, is tagging laws in Legistar?

• Is there a reason laws like Local Law 163 are not tagged?

I’d love anyone at the City Council to get back to me on these questions. You all do good, hard work, and I’d like to help.

1. The federal government is having a similar conversation.

2. The excerpt from section 1: “No later than January 31, 2024, and annually for five years thereafter, the department shall conduct targeted outreach to educate building owners about the benefits of installing solar and green roof systems. Educational materials distributed pursuant to this section shall be in plain language and made available in all of the designated citywide languages, as defined in section 23-1101 of this code. Such educational materials shall also be available on the department’s website.”

3. The excerpts from section 6:
“…Implementation plan. No later than July 1, 2023, the department shall develop, submit to the mayor and speaker of the council, and post on the department’s website a curbside organics collection implementation plan…

…Reporting. The department shall report by weight the total amount of organic waste diverted pursuant to this section during the previous year, disaggregated by sanitation district. Such report shall be included as part of the department’s annual zero waste report required pursuant to section 16-316.5 of this chapter.…

…Education and outreach. The department shall develop an outreach and education program to educate residents, building owners, and staff of residential buildings on the curbside organics collection program established pursuant to this section…the department shall distribute such materials to residents, building owners, and community based organizations…Such materials shall also be made available on the department’s website.”

I’ll note here: there are reporting requirements outside the “Reporting” sections of this law. Education and outreach as outlined above was counted as a reporting requirement in local law 57. Similarly, “plans and studies” are inconsistently counted as reports throughout the law.

For other examples of laws that merely expand existing reporting requirements, rather than create new ones, see local laws 25 and 147 of 2023.

4. All of the excerpts from the law are found in section 2, emphasis added:

“Fair housing plan. In accordance with the schedule required for the submission of a fair housing plan required by HUD, or in the absence of such required schedule no later than October 1, 2025 and every 5 years thereafter, the administrating agency shall submit a fair housing plan to the mayor and the speaker of the council and post such plan on its website. Such plan shall include, but need not be limited to…”

“…Housing production targets. No later than 1 year after the submission of a fair housing plan pursuant to subdivision b of this section, the administrating agency shall submit to the mayor and the speaker of the council and post on its website:

1. A 5-year citywide housing production target for each of the following housing types: total housing units; affordable housing units; deeply affordable housing units; housing serving formerly homeless households; and the preservation of housing units. In determining such targets, the administrating agency shall consider, among other factors it deems relevant, the long-term housing needs assessment developed pursuant to subdivision c of this section.

2. For each community district, 5-year housing production targets for the following housing types identified in paragraph 1 of this subdivision: total housing units; affordable housing units; deeply affordable housing units; and housing serving formerly homeless households. In determining such targets, the administrating agency shall consider, among other factors it deems relevant…”

“…Strategic equity framework. No later than 1 year after the submission of a fair housing plan pursuant to subdivision b of this section, the administrating agency shall submit to the mayor and the speaker of the council and post on its website a strategic equity framework that assesses obstacles to and identifies goals and strategies for furthering fair housing citywide and across community districts. Such framework shall include, but need not be limited to…”

“…Report. No later than October 1, 2026, and annually thereafter, the administrating agency shall submit to the mayor and the speaker of the council and post on its website an annual update on the city’s progress relating to the goals and strategies identified pursuant to subdivision b of this section, except that no such annual update shall be due in any year for which a plan pursuant to subdivision b or a report pursuant to subdivisions c, d, or e of this section is due…”

5. Section 224.1 of the charter was originally added by local law 86 of 2005. Subdivision f of such section 224.1 required an annual report from the mayor, and section 3 of the local law itself required a separate annual report which expired in 2019. Local law 51 of 2023 replaced the former with two different reporting requirements.

6. This law’s legislative history is fascinating, and filled with other local laws that defy a simple understanding of what triggers a “Report Required” tag (often because they are older than 2016, which is when the tag was rolled out full-time).

This law amends section 19-182 of the administrative code of the city of New York, which was originally added by section 3 of local law 11 of 2008. This local law introduces multiple reporting requirements to the council and others, including this one in section 1 of the law: “…the department shall send a report…to the council member and community board in whose district the crash location is located.” Nonetheless, this bill is not tagged as “Report Required.”

The next law to amend this same section of the admin code was local law 12 of 2011. It introduces multiple reporting requirements to the council and others, but does not contain a “Report Required” designation. For example, section 5 of the law says: “The department shall issue such plan to the mayor and council ninety days after the date on which the local law that added this section takes effect.  Such report shall include, but not be limited to…” The bill’s title is (emphasis added): “A Local Law to amend the administrative code of the city of New York, in relation to pedestrian safety reporting.”

Another law that amended this same section of the admin code was local law 49 of 2021. The law does not have a “Report Required” designation, but section 1 of the law reads: “…Reporting. No later than April 30, 2022, and every three months thereafter, the department shall post on its website a report with information on each investigation…”

7. Per section 1 of the law: “Green roof map. a. The commissioner, in collaboration with the department of buildings, shall publish on the green infrastructure program map, or on another map on the department’s website, the location of every green roof, as defined in section 24-526.1, in the city, using the best information available.

b. For each green roof indicated on such map, the map shall provide at a minimum, based on the best information available, the following information…”

8. Bill Drafting Manual: A Guide to Legislative Composition for the City of New York, 3rd edition (2022), p. 59.

Note: this paragraph is different from the version in the 2nd edition from 2018:

“Some bills require that an agency report to the Mayor, Council Members, or other elected officials regarding the bill’s implementation and effects. Indeed, some bills contain only reporting requirements, with no other substantive provisions.”