The City Council is Chronically Late
If you want to go to a hearing, prepare for delays
I go to New York City Council meetings frequently, and I also go with students in my Foundations of New York City class. One thing they always notice: the meetings never start on time!
While I know this from personal experience, I’ve never actually taken a look at the numbers. So that’s what this post is—a data-driven look into the Council’s punctuality, which is metaphorically encapsulated in this moment from the April 25, 2024, technology committee meeting1:
They were referring to the clock on the main Council chamber wall, on the right in this image:
The Council is essentially never on time
You can see the Council’s calendar of meetings here. The data for this post is from September 2024, unless otherwise noted.
During September 2024, across 43 meetings, the Council was late:
Median: 16 minutes
Mean: 20 minutes
Stated meetings: There’s some nuance here though. While most of the Council’s meetings are committee hearings, a few are “stated meetings,” when the whole Council convenes to conduct business. Those ones are generally more delayed than any other meeting. The two in September were late by an hour, and an hour and twenty minutes.
Of all 19 stated meetings so far in 2024, the Council was late:
Median: 41 minutes
Mean: 46 minutes
The most punctual stated meeting was 8 minutes late, and the next-most-punctual was 30 minutes late.
Note: stated meetings are usually preceded by a press conference where the Speaker and other legislators will speak about their agenda (and inevitably take other questions); this is part of setting up the stated meeting, and is generally the reason its posted start time varies from its actual start time so much.2
Who is punctual?
In September 2024, these committees were no more than 10 minutes late:
Committee on Fire and Emergency Management: 9.8 minutes*
Committee on General Welfare: 6.5 minutes
Committee on Health: 9.5 minutes
Committee on Veterans: 4.1 minutes
Committee on Women and Gender Equity: 6.9 minutes
Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises: 4.7 minutes*
Asterisk* = this is the median of multiple meetings during the month
🏆 I would say the Land Use Committee’s Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises is the most punctual group in the Council in September, since they maintained their good start time across three meetings.
About the data
I pulled all of this data from Legistar. To derive the punctuality of each meeting, I not only had to know the scheduled start time (which is posted), but the actual start time, which is not—at least not obviously. So how can you get that time, even if you weren’t there in person?
If you look at the Legistar schedule below, you’ll see a “video” link at the end of each row—that is the video footage of the meeting.
If you click on any video link, it will open a video window that looks like this:
The meeting start time is the final string of numbers before the mp4 file extension. In the case of the image above, that is “140221,” which translates to 14:02:21pm, which is the 24-hour version of 2:02:21pm (two minutes and twenty-one seconds past 2pm).
To get the punctuality of any individual meeting, you just compare the actual start time (2:02pm) with the scheduled start time (1:30pm). 42 minutes late!
Note: all meeting transcripts, which are uploaded a few days after the meeting, post meeting actual start and end times. They generally agree with the times in the video titles (which also generally align with my own personal timekeeping), but you will see variations of a few minutes.
Why do I care about this?
Because I attend Council meetings, and I send students to them. I just want their expectations to be calibrated. I understand why some delays happen in the Council (it is just people doing their jobs, after all), and I understand that they happen.3
But almost no one not immediately connected to the Council knows either of those things. Every time I attend a stated meeting especially, I prepare to wait about an hour past the scheduled start time; but you know who doesn’t? Almost every other member of the public who might attend for one reason or another.
If you work in a Council Member’s office and you have visitors or advocates coming to the Council, send them this post! And regardless of whether or not you do this, understand how the Council’s schedule makes it appear to others.4
TRANSCRIPT OF THE MINUTES Of the COMMITTEE ON TECHNOLOGY, April 25, 2024; p. 59, lines 8:16.
The Council is open to the public, but its primary job is acting as a legislature—that entails rescheduling and delays. I think they could communicate better about expected delays (because they should be expected!), but otherwise that’s just part of being in a legislature. And while I think they could be better about scheduling, I’m not upset at all about the current state of things. That’s show biz, baby.
https://randsinrepose.com/archives/late-again/