“It’s easier to exchange a prisoner of war than it is to transfer a stenographer from the Tax Department to the Water Department.”

• Mayor LaGuardia, 1934

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Mayor Mamdani has not ignored the necessity of structural reform to get government moving faster and delivering better. Nor has he underestimated the value of one of the most powerful tools available to reform-seeking New York City mayors, Charter Revision Commissions (CRCs).1

Within a few months of taking office, Mamdani launched his own CRC under the nickname COGE (the Commission on Government Efficiency). CRCs can rewrite the city’s constitution by referendum with only a simple majority of voters, and mayors can convene them at will. Even better, of the 22 charter amendments proposed by CRCs since 2005, voters have approved 20 of them.

When the Mayor launched COGE, he stated that its goals would be to find efficiencies in the bureaucracy (specifically: “improving efficiency, modernizing city government and ensuring government keeps pace”). The name and messaging are a direct reference to the federal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Fortunately, unlike DOGE, which may have cost the federal government more than it saved it, the Mayor’s COGE appears focused on state capacity improvements that help agencies achieve their mandates. Recent polling from Blue Rose Research/ also affirms that voters prefer COGE’s capacity-building approach to DOGE’s slash-and-burn strategy.

COGE moved fast to get its proposals on the ballot this fall. It was announced May 28, ran two public input sessions in every borough, drew more than 1,200 attendees, heard 250+ people give 25 hours of testimony, reviewed more than 600 written submissions, and on July 23 unanimously adopted its final report. Five ballot questions will now go to New York City voters in November.

I encourage New Yorkers to vote yes on all the ballot questions. Their passage would make vital adjustments to overburdened agency processes, resulting in faster and better delivery of essential city services.

Unfortunately, the changes they propose, while necessary to unlock a capable city government, are not enough on their own to bring government processes into the 21st century. That will require reforms outside the City Charter, many of which COGE studied and stated it could not address.

This post provides a summary of the COGE ballot proposals, reasons why you should vote yes on them, and then suggestions for where further government reform should focus in New York.

What each COGE ballot proposal covers, and why New York should vote yes

The most straightforward description of what New Yorkers will vote on this November is COGE’s own plain-language abstracts for each question, alongside the ballot text and the actual charter amendments. I encourage every voter to read at least one of these documents before voting.

Question 1: Streamline the approval process for pedestrian ramps, benches, and sidewalk cafés

If a restaurant or building owner wishes to install a bench, sidewalk café, or accessibility ramp, they need a “revocable consent” from the Department of Transportation, which requires a public hearing and paid notices in newspapers. COGE found that the outdoor dining process can take up to eight months. Meanwhile, the associated fees sometimes exceed the annual fee for using the space itself. Both the financial cost and administrative burden have made outdoor dining unsustainable for most restaurants.

This proposal would make those hearings discretionary, end the newspaper notice requirement, merge the sidewalk and roadway cafe applications into one, and remove the City Council’s power to disapprove a sidewalk cafe. COGE projects these changes would shorten the application process for roadway cafes (currently 3-5 months) and sidewalk cafes (currently 6-8 months) to just two months.

Even with this streamlined approval process, community boards, borough presidents, and Council members would retain their notice and their right to comment.2 While the proposed changes won’t entirely fix the reasons for the drop in sidewalk cafes, they’ll go a long way toward making the process simpler for both businesses and the city.

Question 2: Modernize city contracting to expand opportunities for small businesses and nonprofit organizations

This proposal would let the Procurement Policy Board simplify and tier the questionnaire every vendor is required to complete, so a small-scale business like a hot dog cart would no longer need to answer the same questions as a commercial bank. It removes a mandatory hearing on an annual client services plan, lets the Mayor delegate approval of certain contracts to agency chief contracting officers, makes permanent the online comment period that replaced in-person contract hearings, and requires the Procurement Policy Board to actually meet quarterly.

This is the proposal I am most excited about, as it could have far-reaching consequences: nearly 40% of the City’s budget goes toward procured goods and services. Implementing COGE’s suggestions here will vastly improve the City’s procurement process, resulting in providers being paid sooner and removing some costly uncertainty in the process. These are much-needed changes for a system that is well-known to be broken and that unjustly harms the contractors New York most relies on to function.

As I’ll discuss below, not all the problems with the procurement process can be fixed by simply changing the City Charter, nor do COGE’s proposals address all the issues. But improving the process in whatever ways possible through the Charter should still be done while more fundamental reforms are pursued.

Question 3: Accelerate road safety projects and the activation of underutilized city property

Agencies consulted on any major transportation project would confer only at the agency-head level.3 The most impactful change here is that a technical failure to consult multiple other agencies could no longer be used to stop or rescind a completed street safety project.

This would greatly streamline project timelines. For example, the Fire Department (FDNY) would no longer have to confer with every affected firehouse, and the Department of Transportation (DOT) could begin work on a project justified by crash data before completing notifications. In 2025, DOT designated 37 major transportation projects, of which 13 were delayed by the review process. This reform would unblock those 13 projects in future cases.

A new fast track would also be created for the DOT Commissioner to approve “critical safe street improvements when there is an identified immediate need for improvements”. This is a similar concept to the fast track for affordable housing that voters approved last November.

Similar to the other proposals, these reforms would speed up the administrative side of overdue street improvements and delayed land use applications. Safeguards remain for reviews and community input, but highly constricted agencies like DOT will be allowed to actually implement desired street changes promptly. Given that DOT has been hitting a fraction of its Streets Plan targets for years, strategies to shorten the transition from a crash-heavy roadway to a new bus or bike lane are worth pursuing.

Question 4: Simplify the building permitting process

This proposal lets the Buildings Commissioner appoint more than two deputies and citywide borough commissioners who can sign off on construction documents, directs the Department of Buildings (DOB) to build one centralized permit submission system with the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), FDNY, and DOT by 2030, and moves waterfront permitting from Small Business Services to DOB.

The centralized permitting hub is the most exciting idea of this bunch. The current process to build or renovate in New York involves applying for up to 40 permits and approvals from 18 separate offices. This is another common-sense reform that streamlines an administrative process while retaining necessary safeguards. Other states, like New Jersey and Pennsylvania, have had tremendous success with centralizing application processes into one application or incentivizing speedier decisions with refunds for missed deadlines. It is long overdue for New York to do the same.

Question 5: Require contributions to the rainy day fund to strengthen long-term fiscal resilience

New York created a rainy day fund by referendum in 2019 but never set a target or a deposit rule, so contributions have been whatever the Mayor and Council determine each year. This proposal would set a target of 12% of the prior year’s tax revenue across reserves and require the NYC Office of Management and Budget (OMB) (in conjunction with the City Comptroller) to publish a deposit methodology by May 2027, updated every four years. Deposits will still require appropriation, so this is more like a commitment to a plan than a hard mandate.

Current NYC Comptroller has beaten the drum on the need for mandates for the rainy day fund, and while this doesn’t go all the way toward doing that, it is still a positive step forward. Setting a target will relieve the inconsistent nature of the rainy day fund and stabilize the City’s finances for potential future hard times. As with the other reforms proposed by COGE, my hope is that this is just the beginning of more work to be done in this area.

COGE takes necessary steps on state capacity, but it doesn’t provide all the solutions

COGE proposes to tackle slow processes where the City Charter is the source of the delays. The reforms it introduces would massively speed up permitting and approval processes. But many sources of delays in public service delivery come from other sources: staffing issues, State law, outdated technology and data infrastructure, or agency practice.

Consider the procurement process, where COGE proposed some modest changes but also acknowledged that “the Commission determined that many solutions to the issues affecting City procurements also lie outside the Charter.” In these cases, COGE only documented the problems for future actors to solve. Addressing them may have an even larger impact on government effectiveness than the initiatives COGE did advance to the ballot.

Assuming these ballot questions are approved by the voters, what changes should the city and state governments tackle next to make New York run better?

Two particularly problematic blockers on government capability are named by COGE but not addressed: failure to adopt new technology and excessive reporting requirements. Without reforms on these issues, all other public process improvements remain subject to outdated modes of operation.

COGE’s technology chapter in its reports was its most ambitious, covering what government could do with ideas like an 18F-style in-house team of engineers and designers, no vendor lock-in, and agencies whose data systems actually talk to each other. It warned that new tools are “improving faster than any procurement process or budget cycle was built to absorb.” The State Capacity Ecosystem team, of which I am a part, has written about this exact concern and why it is going to become a bigger and bigger problem for government capacity if not addressed soon.

Unfortunately, there is no ballot question or referral to a future commission concerning these ideas. In COGE’s final report, technology reform only exists as a three-page appendix describing what the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI) is already working on. This ignores the fact that OTI is operating in a broken, outdated system and has limited ability to change that on its own.

On reporting requirements, COGE surveyed every city agency and reviewed the reporting portal maintained by the Department of Records (DORIS). They found more than 1,500 reporting laws passed or updated since 2011, more than 2,000 separate reporting requirements on the books, nearly 1,000 reports produced every single year, more than 350 every quarter, and over 125,000 staff hours a year spent writing them. I found similar evidence in my Legislation Implementation Tracker, which extracts obligations from the text of every local law enacted since 2014 and counts 888 reports due at least once a year.

Yet, having measured and acknowledged the severity of this issue, COGE only recommended that a future commission take it up. So what can actually be done to address these gaps in state capacity, and where should government reform efforts focus next?

The agenda for the Council, Albany, and the next commission

Here are my recommendations, largely corroborated by COGE’s final report and by Vital City’s panel of former officials and scholars advising the commission:

• Fix civil service in Albany. State law governs civil service rules in NYC, so this one requires cooperation with Albany. As I wrote in December, the certification waits and the Rule of Three are why the City carries thousands of vacancies year over year. In that post, I describe a number of fixes that would enable the City to attract, hire, and retain much-needed talent and labor. All state capacity issues flow through public employees, so fixing civil service hiring and bringing in new talent faster must be prioritized.

• Give the Reports and Advisory Board Review Commission (RABRC) a larger role. Charter §1113 lets RABRC waive reporting requirements. COGE found that since RABRC was created, local laws have required or revised over 1,500 reports, but RABRC has eliminated only 28. Auto-refer any report DORIS shows unfiled for two cycles, and make RABRC vote on retention. I wrote more about the effects excessive reporting requirements have on slowing down government processes here.

• Create a separate technology procurement track. A 1,372-day median is not a process that can be optimized at the margins, and requires fundamental change. With the pace of technology development, particularly with AI, moving faster than ever, government needs to move faster to take advantage.

• Restructure OTI to be central to every agency’s technology adoption process. This requires a radical reframing of OTI’s role in city government. Colorado recently made such a change and is now the leading example on how government can successfully implement new technologies.

• Give every builder agency the powers that bodies like the Economic Development Corporation (EDC) already have. Former NYC DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg put it best in her advice to the commission: “Every agency should be able to procure and hire and do what an EDC or School Construction Authority can.” Learn from successful agency programs and private-public partnerships, like EDC’s revitalization of the NYC Ferry, and adapt to new models of work system-wide. It requires Albany to unlock this ability for the city.

• Procurement reform, procurement reform, procurement reform. There is so much broken with the current system of public procurement. Too much to summarize in this bullet or include in this piece – but look out for a piece covering this soon.

Show up in November, and then keep fighting for reform

I highly encourage New Yorkers to vote yes on all five proposals, as they will result in a city government that runs faster and better.

But just passing these ballot questions will not be enough. Relative to the scale of problems hampering the City’s ability to deliver, COGE put forward modest reforms to the voters. Reforms that determine whether a shelter provider makes payroll, whether the City can hire an engineer, and whether it can buy software before that software is obsolete are not on the ballot. These fixes will require action in Albany, in the City Council, and in further commitments by this Mayor’s administration.

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Until the Interborough Express (IBX) eventually opens, there is only a single (non-shuttle) subway line in New York that does not go through Manhattan: the G train. Unfortunately, since the summer of 2024, this unique Brooklyn-Queens Crosstown Local line has often been absent on weekends.

For riders hoping to travel between the waterfront regions of Brooklyn (2.65 million people) and Queens (2.36 million), two boroughs each with a larger population than Manhattan (1.66 million), the G is usually the most reliable method. It is the only subway option that does not require a transfer in Manhattan, which can add significant time to a typical journey.

Of course, the G is nowhere near the line with the highest ridership, nor do its regular weekend disappearances over the past years have significant effects on the city’s economy or tourism industry. The situation is nowhere near as bad as 2017’s “Summer of Hell” train failures that made major news headlines.

But the duration for which the G has experienced these service disruptions with seemingly no end in sight has hampered local businesses, confused and inconvenienced residents, and hurt the MTA’s reputation as a reliable service. And while the work causing the closures is justified, the lengthy project timeline and the manner in which the MTA has handled the shutdowns has been…less than ideal.

Fair to public agencies or not, it is in these less extreme but more frequent cases of transit project delays and confusion that residents form their impression of how much those agencies care about them. Shutdowns that last for years, lack of reliable alternative options, and schedules that keep changing all contribute to a mistrust in government services. The resulting loss of public buy-in can then lead to the election of politicians or shifts in funding that further harm the ability to deliver on future projects.

So what has caused the G’s service disruption to stretch on for years, what will be the eventual benefit of this work, and what could be done to improve (or even prevent) future subway closures?

What are riders actually getting for all these lost weekends?

The reason for the station closures is defensible and even exciting: the G is getting an upgraded signal system, the same as what the L and the 7 trains have been upgraded to in recent years that resulted in dramatic service improvements.

The new signal technology is called communications-based train control (CBTC), and it is much overdue for all of New York’s trains. The G’s current signals date to the 1930s, like many other lines, and work by dividing the track into fixed blocks. To ensure safety, a train cannot enter a block until the train ahead has fully left it. The new CBTC system replaces that antiquated method with radio: each train reports its exact position continuously, so trains can safely run closer together and the system recovers faster when something goes wrong.

The MTA awarded a $368 million design-build contract for these signal improvements in early 2023, expecting the job to take just under five years, concluding in late 2027. The full project also includes replacement of 30 miles of track, 17 switches, the Court Square interlocking and equipment at 10 stations, and carries a budget the MTA has put at about $624 million.

All these upgrades would make the G one of the most reliable services for its roughly 160,000 weekday riders. On the L, CBTC is what allowed the MTA to run 20 trains an hour through a two-track tunnel. On the 7, it brought weekday on-time performance from 68% to 91%. The new system is even “designed so it actually could accommodate longer trains” than the relatively short four-car sets the G runs today. When the work is done, riders on the G can expect trains that arrive on time, with fewer gaps between trains, and potential for added capacity as neighborhoods like Greenpoint and Williamsburg keep growing.

This work is exactly the kind that needs to be done to bring NYC’s transit system into the 21st-century. The service disruptions are, unfortunately, necessary on a 24/7 system and were always expected to take several years. A fair question to ask, however, is why the original project timeline ran five years, and why it has been extended even further out since then.

Every signal upgrade has run late, and the timelines were long to begin with

In June 2025, the MTA said the work would run “through Q3 2027.” Just one month later, the MTA said the new signals would not be activated until 2029, because the new R211 trains need new 5G radios to operate effectively. More recently, the MTA’s independent engineering consultant for some of the work put activation at July 2029.

This work is not the first or only example of already long project timelines being extended. To name several other examples:

• The 7’s signals were promised for 2016 and switched on in November 2018.

• Queens Boulevard (E/F/M/R) was promised for March 2021 and entered service in February 2022.

• Culver South (F) was promised for June 2023 and delivered in September 2025.

• The three projects still running – 8th Avenue (A/C/E), Queens Boulevard East (E/F) and the Crosstown (G) – are currently all 21 to 33 months behind by one count.

A contributing factor to these long project timelines and delays is the sheer age and lack of maintenance of the system. Tracks and equipment over 100 years old, suffering from decades without investment, are finally being fixed or replaced. For example, during the G’s summer 2024 shutdown, work crews completed the following at ten G subway stations:

• Scraping, priming and painting 233,645 square feet of platform, track and mezzanine ceiling

• Replacing 9,495 tiles

• Scraping, priming and painting 1,802 station columns

• Converting 4,858 LED lamps

The MTA is taking the opportunity to use signal upgrade shutdowns to perform other overdue upgrades, like deep cleaning stations and fixing tracks and tiles. The necessity for doing this maintenance work is real, but it means that signal upgrade projects are actually involving much more work.

As MTA Construction & Development President Jamie Torres-Springer said in 2022,

Procurement issues also plague the project, as they seemingly do in all other domains of government services these days. The July 2025 MTA capital program report identified “delays due to procurement, design, installation and commissioning of a 5G radio (carborne) retrofit of the R211 and R179 fleets…In addition, the contractor is late to get the approval of the signal wayside block design.” This delay alone is expected to add $24 million to the total cost of the G train upgrades.

While the 5G radio issue is specific to the G’s upgrade delays, the reliance on lone private vendors for products and the failure to coordinate with and across multiple contractors is not. In fact, the MTA “blamed the agency’s contractors and a lack of engineering expertise for the delays” across all the signal upgrade projects. These issues occur across other transit projects too.

The L and 7’s signal upgrades each took about a decade, and the G may be on track for the same timeline. According to the RPA’s “Moving Forward” report in May 2014, if CBTC installation work continued at its current pace, “it would take the agency over 85 years to convert half the system to CBTC”. Given that the L’s CBTC signals are due to be replaced in 2028, this means the modern signals are aging much faster than the rate at which they can be installed or replaced.

While recommending procurement policy changes and other state capacity improvements is outside the scope of this article, that RPA report offers some excellent possibilities to consider. These include restructuring projects so that shutdowns are consolidated and modifying procurement rules, and more flexibility to work on the tracks throughout the day. The Transit Costs Project also has a section on New York that explains why NYC transit projects run sky-high expenses and extended timelines, with similar suggested reforms to contracting and procurement processes.

What the MTA and NYC DOT can still do about the years left

Tens of thousands of riders enter the subway at G train stops on a typical weekend day. Visitors and tourists traveling to popular stores in neighborhoods like Greenpoint rely on the G. But for nearly half of the weekends in 2026 so far, a significant portion of the route (Court Square to Bedford-Nostrand) has been shut down for track work.

The stretched project timeline has now resulted in a full summer shutdown in 2024, 10 weekends in 2025, and 15 of the first 34 weekends in 2026. Since the summer 2024 shutdown began, riders have lost 35 of 113 weekends on at least one segment of the G. And service has not been trending better. Adding the remaining upcoming closures announced for September and proposed for the first three weekends of December, 2026 will end up with 20 of 52 weekends with no G service (38% of the year).

Alternative travel options when the G is down are just woefully insufficient. Those still hoping to travel along the G’s route are left with the following options:

1. MTA Bus: often unreliable, sparse service on weekends, and subject to slow traffic conditions

2. MTA-run G train shuttle replacement: subject to all the same issues as the buses

3. Walk/bike: while an excellent ride along the waterfront on a good-weather day, not an option for all folks and increasingly costly in dollars or time

Every weekend G closure has come with a free shuttle bus that runs on the same streets as the B62. Unfortunately, the four bus routes that parallel the G averaged 6 to 8 mph on weekends in the first half of 2026. Despite recent efforts by the MTA to improve bus speeds, this is the same average speed as in 2023. And, as Streetsblog has pointed out, any shuttle using these same roads will be subject to the same blocked bus stops and grinding weekend traffic.

Court Sq to Bedford-Nostrand is 15 minutes on the G, but at the B62’s weekend speed it takes 40 minutes. Greenpoint Av to Hoyt-Schermerhorn is 18 minutes by train, 37 minutes by bus, and 93 minutes on foot. A Citi Bike easily beats shuttle and bus times, but at a price: a non-member on an e-bike pays $4.99 to unlock plus 41 cents a minute, which comes out to about $17.70 for that ride, if a bike is even available.

Evidence that the buses and G shuttle are not reliable replacements is in the survey data as well. Also in that Streetsblog article, a survey of Greenpoint shop owners reported weekend sales down an average of 20% on weekends without the train.

So what can the MTA, or in some cases the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT), do to make up for service disruptions that may continue for several more years? A free alternative shuttle is a good start, but clearly leaves some meaningful areas where more could be done to inform, assist, and win over affected riders. For example, during the L’s shutdown, the MTA and DOT added new bus routes, free out-of-system transfers, and we got the 14th Street busway.

The remaining closures run at least through 2028, so there is plenty of time to pursue more solutions. Some ideas:

1. DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn should install weekend bus lanes on the shuttle route for every remaining closure, on Manhattan Avenue, McGuinness Boulevard, and Bedford Avenue. Mayor Mamdani appointed the Commissioner on his first day with a mandate to move buses faster. A shuttle that covers Court Sq to Bedford-Nostrand in 25 minutes instead of 40 would be a great contribution to that effort.

2. MTA Construction and Development President Jamie Torres-Springer should publish the full closure calendar through activation, so that a Greenpoint business owner planning for December 2027 knows now, and put the shuttles in the MTA’s own app and in Google Maps, where riders currently cannot even find them. Free Citi Bike rides and extra dock capacity in Greenpoint on closure weekends cost a fraction of a $624 million project and would also aid affected residents.

3. The MTA should publish a post-CBTC service target for the G: trains per hour, on weekends as well as weekdays. The L got 20 trains an hour out of its upgrade. Riders who have lost service for 35 weekends and counting should know what they will be getting out of all this work. Better marketing and public awareness campaigns about what riders are getting from ongoing service disruptions would go far to earning buy-in.

Of course, all the above suggestions are just band-aids on the more chronic issue of transit project timelines being severely extended in NYC. To prevent future signal upgrades, of which there are many left to do, from taking a decade per line, New York needs to fix its broken procurement and contracting process.

Solutions that strike at the heart of the issue will involve state-level procurement reform, in-housing more transit expertise, implementing newer technologies like AI to assist both planning and implementation, and other systemic fixes which I covered here and which the excellent Transit Costs Project goes into detail here.

While such changes will not come easy, their potential to radically reduce project timelines (and costs) and restore trust in public service render them valuable and necessary.

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• What: Public Engagement Hackathon, the State Capacity Ecosystem’s second flagship build event.

• When: Wednesday, September 30, 5:30 pm to 11 pm. Matchmaking at 5:30, builds from 6:30 to 9, demos at 9, social hour after.

• Where: Sign up to view location

• Sign up: Register on Luma. Dinner will be provided.

• Partners: CUNY PIT Lab, Civic Roundtable

• Judges: Raj Korpan (CUNY PIT Lab), Jeremy Ney (American Inequality), Sara Lind (Open Plans), with more to be announced.

• Want to find teammates before the event? Be the first to hear about future events? Help build the State Capacity Ecosystem? Join the SCE Slack.

At the first State Capacity Ecosystem build night, 80+ attendees produced 20 working tools that addressed real government tech gaps in under two hours. The takeaway wasn’t just the technology itself; the magic was in watching the force multipliers of the State Capacity Ecosystem. A practitioner who has lived inside a problem can now describe it to someone who can build against it, and the two of them can have a working prototype before the end of the night.

Our team wrote a bit about what those prototypes looked like here and spotlighted some of the products that shipped.

On September 30, we’re running it back. This time, the night’s problem statements are centered on how New York actually hears from New Yorkers. The city has no shortage of input channels: it has 59 community boards, a 311 line, participatory budgeting, and public hearings on everything from liquor licenses to land use, all meant to allow public feedback into city processes. But it lacks the tech infrastructure in many cases to make the information generated from those channels actionable, representative, equitable, and connected to outcomes.

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Stream One: Community Boards Ops

CBs have a lot to listen to and track, with almost no supporting tools

Community boards (CBs) are the city’s ground floor for public input: every land use action, liquor license, and street redesign passes through one of the 59 boards, and each board runs on volunteer members, a staff of two or three, and whatever filing system it has improvised on its own. Unfortunately, tech tooling for CBs is nearly nonexistent (and probably not a historically attractive venture capital market).

Here are three possible build paths for participants:

• A meeting assistant. Robert’s Rules and parliamentary procedure trip up new members constantly. CB resolutions get drafted from scratch each time. A procedural helper or a resolution writing agent might solve hours of headache for CB members.

• A member educator. Term limits from the 2018 charter revision force the first wave of open community board seats in 2027, which means hundreds of new members learning the job at once, and onboarding today is weak. An AI assistant or a data-backed member guide would arrive at exactly the right time.

• An end-to-end resolution tracker. Boards pass resolutions addressed to agencies: Transportation Committee resolutions to the Department of Transportation (DOT), Parks Committee resolutions to the Parks Department, so on. Then, in many cases, nothing visible happens. A tracker that connects each resolution to its target agency and follows what the agency actually does would give boards something they might lack: clear evidence of whether anyone listens.

The data is plentiful but dispersed. NYC Planning’s Zoning Application Portal carries every Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) action, the Community Boards dataset is on NYC Open Data, and the NYC Council’s Legistar has a public API. On my data website, I have already aggregated all 59 board websites, members, and leadership in one place. And of course, I have to plug Block Party, which has meeting transcripts and extracted resolutions ready to query for many community boards.

Stream Two: Public Voice At Scale

Governments take in a lot of citizen feedback, but is that feedback inclusive, fair, and effectively digested?

City Hall frequently holds hearings to understand public sentiment on high priority topics and issues. Agencies engage with communities to learn how they can best help constituents. New Yorkers filed 3,655,040 requests through 311 in 2025, about 10,000 every day. Democratic participation is great, but how and when citizens interact with the government can introduce significant bias and complexity to analysis: who gets to offer the feedback, how is each piece of feedback weighted, and who hears it? Ideas here include:

• A complaint-pattern dashboard with a residual map. Model expected complaint volume for each district from its conditions, then map the gap between expected and actual. Where complaints fall well below expectation, you have likely found under-served blocks. Experts like Vital City’s rolling “CrowdVox” interviews could then validate whether the lack of complaints might mean community satisfaction or resignation.

• A citizen-observation toolkit. The Central Park Squirrel Census proved that volunteer observers can produce a real dataset (3,023 squirrels, counted block by block). How might the city harness citizen energy and collective observations for other needs: on potholes, blocked bike lanes, broken park lighting, or otherwise? What tools might facilitate the collection, analysis, and display of such data?

• Tools that serve the marginalized voice. Cluster participatory budgeting ideas by neighborhood and theme, mine the Council’s hearing archive to analyze public testimony at scale, or geo-tag social media conversations to neighborhoods, topics, and agencies, turning real unstructured public voice data into something an agency or a board can act on. Build agents that support language translation where human translators might not be available. Leverage technology to reach folks whom the government does not reach today

Participants might utilize the 311 Service Requests dataset, which covers every request since 2010 with location, type, agency, and resolution fields, as their base data layer. Social media data or public comment data are underused by the city and provide live feeds of the public voice. Or builders might instead prioritize tools that help generate new data from historically underserved and underheard constituents.

Stream Three: Judges Specials

Our Judges are mulling over problem statements of their own. Builders might decide to “play it by ear” and generate novel solutions day of.

This is a dealer’s choice category. Here are a couple of ideas the judges have floated thus far, and we expect more to follow:

1. How can we create a Big Tent that includes many different voices/organizations but does not find itself struggling with an ‘everything bagel liberalism’ where nothing gets done because the org has bitten off too much?

2. Could we map the areas around transit stations in NYC that are not zoned for residential but probably should be to increase transit-oriented housing (these would be C8 or M1 zones)? With a particular focus on the Bronx.

Get to know the judges

The judges attending the 9/30 hackathon are experts in these topics, and they’re excited to see what you can build for them.

Raj Korpan, CUNY PIT Lab.

Raj Korpan is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Hunter College, CUNY. Raj researches artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, explainable AI, and socially aware robotics through Hunter’s Trustworthy, Intelligent, and Explainable Robotics (TIER) Lab. Expect him to push teams on who their AI is designed for, whose perspectives are missing, and whether they have built meaningful mechanisms for trust, explainability, inclusion, and community participation into the product.

Jeremy Ney, author of American Inequality.

Jeremy maps America’s regional divides county by county for more than 25,000 readers, work that has been covered by TIME, The New York Times, and NPR, and he publishes the underlying maps and datasets at americaninequality.io. In his spare time, he is also a full-time employee at Google and teaches as an adjunct professor at Columbia. Expect him to push teams on how data can reveal the less obvious relationships behind social problems, distinguish signal from conventional wisdom, and turn those insights into solutions that can meaningfully improve people’s lives.

Sara Lind, Co-Executive Director at Open Plans.

Sara Lind is Co-Executive Director at Open Plans, a nonprofit with the mission to transform how people experience New York City’s streets and public spaces. She has guided major public policies, driven agendas in City Hall and in Albany, and shaped the narrative on how to make New York’s streets more livable, safer, and joyful. Expect her to push teams on how technology can create stronger connections between public voice and the public realm, giving New Yorkers a meaningful role in shaping the streets and spaces we share.

Additional Judges to be announced!

How the evening runs

• 5:30 to 6: Facilitated team matchmaking. Color-coded name tags mark your problem-area interest and role so you can find a team quickly. You can also join our Slack to find a team ahead of time.

• 6 to 6:15: Introductions. A short welcome from us, CUNY, and our judges.

• 6:15 to 6:30: Breakout Q&A with the judges, then final team selection.

• 6:30 to 9: Build time. Dinner arrives around 7, and we run hourly check-ins.

• 9 to 10: Demos. Three minutes per team: one minute of demo, one minute of judge Q&A, and the next team prepping in the background so the hour moves.

• 10 to 11: Informal social hour at Clinton Hall (16 W 36th St., New York, NY 10018)

What winning teams get: Big kudos, a spotlight slot on the SCE website and at a follow-on demo night, and potentially a special surprise on the day-of.

Come build with us

June proved that the State Capacity Ecosystem community can ship viable solutions to important problems. September 30 asks builders to use those skills to help New Yorkers feel heard. If you work in or around government, study it, advocate for a neighborhood, or build tech products, there is a team on the 30th that needs exactly what you know.

Register for the Public Engagement Hackathon on Luma

While you are at it, join the SCE Slack to follow the run-up, and subscribe to the SCE Substack for updates.

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Two weeks ago I published the NYC Council Legislation Implementation Tracker, a public tool that scans every local law enacted by the City Council since 2014 and extracts the specific obligations each one places on city agencies. Users can read and filter, for every local law’s obligations, who must act, what they must produce, by when, and how often. The launch post argued that agencies are held accountable to a ledger they (and the public) could not see.

Since launching this tracker, I have been fortunate to receive coverage in The City Reporter and a feature in Searchlight, and have received feedback from dozens of agency staff and readers. The tremendous response to this tool has led me to make several enhancements to the tracker and to begin thinking about how to reduce the administrative burden that city agencies face. This post covers both those developments.

The tracker has gotten some upgrades

Attention improves a public tool fast, and I have been able to implement some excellent suggestions provided by readers and early users of the tracker.

Reviews from agency staff, community board colleagues, and other New Yorkers caught real gaps in the dataset. For example, legislation carrying citywide duties on “each city agency” now carry their own tag instead of hiding under Unspecified. Other improvements to the legislation scraping process and how obligations are tracked and assigned to agencies have resulted in slight changes to the headline numbers.

As of today, the tracker contains 8,185 obligations from 2,138 laws, 4,972 of them standing obligations. The tracker will continue to be improved upon and is a constantly evolving tool, so expect to see these numbers change further, though likely just marginally. The legislation scraper will also be running monthly to keep the tracker fresh with new local laws. Please send me corrections or suggestions for anything you spot in the data or the tool. The methodology page will also continue to document every correction.

Significantly, the tracker’s report pages now also show whether each required agency report actually arrives, matched against the Department of Records’ (DORIS) register using the method Josh Greenman built for his NYC Overdue Reports tracker. Integrating DORIS data into the legislation tracker helps track which reports agencies are actually providing, and where they may be falling behind.

Several rounds of additional data audits and validation against DORIS’ register and Legistar’s own metadata have resulted in slight adjustments to the headline figures.

The City Reporter put the count in front of the people who could act on it

Katie Honan’s City Reporter piece asks whether Mayor Mamdani’s efficiency push should tackle the reporting load his own Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE) flagged, and she uses the tracker’s data to quantify that load: more than 8,000 obligations, over 1,500 of them reports, more than 850 recurring at least once a year. When we spoke, I told her what the data makes clear: there is a disconnect between legislators talking about what they passed and the agencies tasked with carrying it out.

Her coverage of the tracker also surfaced debate over the best solution to agencies being overwhelmed with obligations, or whether it is something to be solved at all. Citizens Union’s Grace Rauh wants the city to reconvene the Report and Advisory Board Review Commission (RABRC), the public body that can retire obsolete reports. RABRC has only exercised this power 28 times ever and has not met since December 2024. Reinvent Albany’s Alex Camarda suggests limits on new reporting bills. Meanwhile, Speaker Menin’s office defends reporting as the Council’s oversight tool.

What can be done to alleviate the burden on agencies?

I weighed in with my own suggestions as well in my column over at Citizens Union’s Searchlight, “Unfunded and Unfinished: How Council Mandates Slow the City Down.” In that article, I make the argument that when the Council passes a law, it reliably tells an agency what to do and unreliably supplies the money and people to do it.

Across 254 fiscal impact statements, only 13% mention personnel at all, and 18% declare the new work will be “absorbed within existing resources”. As I wrote when I launched the fiscal impacts tracker, these unfunded mandates explain why agencies often fail to meet such obligations. The burden also concentrates where New Yorkers most feel slow service: ten agencies carry six in ten of the Council’s mandates, led by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene with 582 obligations and the Department of Transportation (DOT) with 442.

This is certainly the case with the Streets Plan mandates, in which the Council stacked new obligations and expectations onto DOT without equivalent increases in funding or staffing. New mandates and recurring obligations increase the administrative burden on each existing city worker, resulting in a fixed pool of time and energy being increasingly divided among a growing pile of mandated reports.

My Searchlight column proposes four changes the Council should adopt, none of which reduces the Council’s power to legislate or to demand information:

1. A labor price tag on every mandate. Every bill imposing an ongoing duty states which unit will do the work, the staff hours it takes per cycle, and whether those hours are new or diverted from existing tasks. The estimate creates a running public record of why agencies slow down.

2. The funding decision on the record. When a fiscal impact statement shows a recurring cost, the bill names a funding source or the Council takes a separate recorded vote to require absorption within existing resources. Unfunded mandates would stay legal in this framework but would be explicitly acknowledged by those voting on them.

3. Sunset obligations by default. New recurring reports and advisory bodies expire in five or ten years unless renewed by simple majority vote. The timeline for sunsetting obligations can be customized to the task, but a date must be set. Only 155 of the 2,138 local laws enacted since 2014 set their own expiration today, while the other 93% run forever.

4. Retire what has already died. Automatically refer to the RABRC any report the DORIS’ register shows as unfiled for two consecutive cycles, and require a formal retention vote. Of the 728 required reports whose filing status can be checked, 214 have never been filed once, and 143 more are overdue.

The demand for cutting administrative burden is real

In addition to the administrative burdens my tracker counts, Mayor Mamdani’s COGE also measured reporting requirements and heard testimony on sunsets. COGE put five charter questions on November’s ballot, allowing voters to aide the city in government reform.

What the attention this tracker has been getting has shown is that there is real demand by the public for reducing administrative burden and unlocking faster and more effective government. COGE’s reports and findings from other civic groups like Citizen’s Union is adding to the momentum toward actually making these reforms.

If you work at a city agency and the tracker gets your obligations wrong, please tell me. And if you are also interested in government reform and how to bring New York’s public sector into the modern era, let’s chat.

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The soundtrack of West 4th starts before you even reach the platform. A drummer echoes through the mezzanine while, just above ground, the unmistakable thump of a basketball carries down from the West 4th courts. A few commuters break into a sprint at the sound of an express train arriving. Others drift toward the exits without any urgency at all, disappearing into the Village for a comedy show or a jazz set.

Entering West 4th Street–Washington Square station (West 4th) during rush hour is also a lesson in urban transportation planning. Eight tracks on two levels, with a spacious and mostly empty level between them (seriously, what is up with that liminal space?). Four island platforms hosting seven subway lines: the A, C, E, B, D, F, and M. Over 3,000 riders arrive per hour, with another 1,500-3,000 departing in the morning and evening rushes.

How is it that a station that opened nearly a century ago can handle such a volume of activity today? 94 years after opening, West 4th St station still achieves what its planners intended: it is the primary location where the old Independent Subway System’s (IND) two Manhattan trunk lines meet. This post is the story of that planning, how the station reached its current form, and how the New York of 2026 makes use of the space created by the New York of 1932.

First, I dig into how one of New York’s most complex subway stations was built decades ahead of demand. Then, Alexa Weiser of City Happenings heads above ground to see what all those riders are actually coming for.

Check out more of Alexa’s writings on what’s happening around NYC each week at her Substack here:

City Happenings

I find the best and weirdest things happening in NYC every single day and send them to you every single Monday.

By Alexa Weiser

Every chart in this post, and the data behind it, lives at the NYCuriosity data hub.

West 4th’s History: capacity built ahead of demand

West 4th Street is a monument to building ahead of demand and to 20th-century urban transportation planning. The IND, the city-owned subway network (as opposed to the private BMT and IRT systems), opened the station in 1932 with the entire lower level already constructed for a Sixth Avenue Line that wouldn’t actually open until 1940.

The station’s name reveals another clue in its consideration of the future: the “West” in the name was added to avoid confusion with South 4th Street, a planned Williamsburg station of the never-built IND Second System. This may strike some as an unusual consideration, given the subway system’s many, many 23rd St stations that until recently all had the same name.

Similarly, when NYU asked for purple tiles to be added during construction, it was refused. Not for aesthetic reasons, but for navigation and consistency. IND stations relied on tile colors as a wayfinding system decades before digital maps were introduced, and the planners refused to depart from a functional style that could aid riders.

While the station opened with service only by local and express A trains, within a year C trains began operation through West 4th Street as well. By 1936, E trains began running through part of the station, and as mentioned, in 1940 the Sixth Avenue Line was added.

West 4th would then have to wait 27 more years for express tracks to 34th Street to be added, bringing B and D express service to this section. In 1961, ground broke on a $22M ($237 million in 2025 dollars) project to add those long-planned express tracks between W 4th and 34th Street. When the B and D express services began in 1967, it completed the 35 year journey from West 4th’s initial opening for the station’s full eight-track design to be realized.

Overall, the IND built the Eighth Avenue Line at $374 million per mile and added express tracks at $158 million per mile (again in 2025 dollars). Compare this to the 2000’s 7 train extension, which cost $2.17 billion per mile. Even more recently, Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 cost $3.25 billion per mile, and Phase 2 is projected at $5.13 billion.

Of course, part of the reason for these vastly different costs per mile is there is now a whole lot more built environment to work around in modern day New York. Labor costs were also much lower in Depression-era NYC, and today’s environmental review and other regulations did not yet exist. I dig more into the many causes of today’s high costs for transportation projects here.

The one 21st-century project with a price tag per mile near IND’s 1930s transit expansions is the Interborough Express (IBX), currently projected at about $393 million per mile. The IBX achieves these lowered costs the same way the 1932 transit project did: by using right-of-way that already exists instead of boring fresh tunnel.

West 4th runs on a nightlife schedule

The MTA’s official 2024 count puts West 4th Street at 10,872,225 riders, the 18th busiest of the subway’s 423 stations, and up 8% over 2023. Since the pandemic drop-off, ridership has steadily increased, though it remains shy of the 2019 peak of 14 million annual riders.

West 4th is also a unique station in its distinctly nightlife-district signature (i.e., strong evenings and weekends ridership) compared to the more typical 9-to-5 commuter station.

On an average 2025 weekday, West 4th held close to 7% of its daily riders per hour through the 7pm to 9pm stretch, while Wall Street station fell to 2% by 9pm. After midnight on weekends the comparison gets even better: in the 12am to 2am hours, West 4th’s share of daily entries is over 9%, ahead of even Bedford Avenue’s 6%, the L stop in which Williamsburg nightlife is centered.

West 4th Street is also a “net destination” station. In every year of the MTA’s origin-destination estimates, more riders arrive at West 4th than enter it, with a gap of roughly half a million riders annually. West 4th functions as a portal to the Village. From there, they get off and then walk, share a ride, or head home from somewhere else.

Pick your exit

For a station named West 4th Street, West 4th has a peculiar feature: you can’t actually exit onto West 4th Street. The station previously had entrances at West 4th and Washington Place, among others, but today its street exits are concentrated around Waverly Place to the north and West 3rd Street to the south.

That makes choosing your exit fairly consequential. At least if, like me, you resent walking an extra five minutes because of a wrong turn.

But whichever direction you choose, you emerge into a remarkably dense pocket of the city. Which brings us back to Tal’s ridership data: more people arrive at West 4th than start their subway trips here.

How much can happen within five minutes of one subway station?

That “net destination” finding didn’t surprise me. What I wanted to know was what exactly all of those people were arriving for.

So I decided to test it. I picked an ordinary Thursday (August 6th, 2026) and looked at what was happening within a five-minute walk of the station. I quickly realized there was far too much to include. So, in honor of the seven subway lines converging below ground, I narrowed it down to seven particularly New York ways you could spend that Thursday night above it.

1. Jazz legend Kenny Garrett was playing at Blue Note.

2. Jefferson Market Library screened The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

3. Murray’s Cheese held a Mediterranean Cheese & Wine Tasting.

4. The Players Theatre opened Marlise, a new murder-mystery musical.

5. Jane Hartsook Gallery was showing Ceramics Now, featuring work by Greenwich House Pottery artists in residence.

6. A local artist was leading a free, drop-in art studio in Washington Square Park.

7. Magic: The Gathering players gathered for Thursday Commander at board game café, The Uncommons.

Of course, we can’t recreate the exact evening of August 6th. Come back a week later and the seven picks would be completely different. But the sheer number of options wasn’t a fluke. Within a few blocks, seven subway lines deliver people to dozens of different New York subcultures.

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Reducing unnecessary and outdated regulations to speed up public bodies’ processes is an excellent idea. But where did all these regulations come from, and how did we reach this point where politicians across the political spectrum are all calling for cutting them down?

Several months ago, I launched my NYC Fiscal Impacts Statement tracker. This is a tool that tracks, aggregates, and tags the fiscal impacts documents attached to most New York City Council (the Council) legislation. The goal was to illuminate the financial costs the Council adds onto agencies and the overall City budget, often without allocating funding or specifying where the dollars would be supplied from.

Financial costs are not the only relevant obligation that the Council imposes on city agencies, and fiscal impact statements do not tell the entire story of Council legislation. Just as important are the administrative obligations created by new laws.

Local laws create new obligations that range from recurring reports on some subject to new enforcement of a regulation to compliance with a process an agency is directed to follow. For example, Local Law 5 of 2014 requires the Police Department to publish traffic collision data monthly, searchable by intersection. These obligations determine how agencies actually spend their staff time. They also contribute to the regulatory bloat that the Mayor and Governor are now fighting to reduce.

It is not easy to understand all the new regulations and expectations (hereafter referred to as ‘obligations’) that come out of the hundreds of local laws that the Council passes each year. This is relevant for citizens who want to better understand why agencies act in the often complex ways they do. It matters even more for the workers at the agencies themselves, who are tasked with interpreting and implementing each new legislative demand on top of the existing ones.

So I built the NYC Council obligations tracker. It uses public Legistar data to pull the full text of every local law enacted since 2014, distills each law into the specific obligations it creates, and organizes them by agency, deadline, deliverable, and recurrence. The count so far: 8,261 obligations from 2,138 local laws, with 5,258 of those obligations being recurring.

Every chart in this post, and the data behind it, lives at the NYCuriosity data hub.

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The tracker makes every local law more transparent and readable

For each of the 2,138 enacted local laws currently in the database, the tracker extracts every discrete obligation from the law’s own text: who must act, what they must produce, by when, and how often. Each obligation is tied to an exact quote from the law, and 95% of those quotes are string-verified against the source text. 77% of obligations resolve to a canonical city agency through NYC Open Data’s NYC Agencies and Governance Organizations dataset, while the rest stay tagged with the law’s own vague phrasing. This in itself turned out to be an interesting finding (more on that below).

The result is a browsable ledger of Council demands with several tools:

• an obligations table filterable by agency, committee, deliverable, and deadline

• an interactive and filterable agency workload view

• a deadline timeline to keep tabs on what reports or directives are coming due

• a per-law implementation checklist, to provide every new law with a checklist of who is responsible and what exactly is now required

Most obligations never retire, they stack

64% of the Council’s obligations are recurring. This could take the form of an annual report, a quarterly inspection, or a standing duty to enforce a rule. Recurring obligations stay on agencies’ books unless a later law repeals them, which is exceedingly rare.

This means the Council’s demands on agencies do not reset with each legislative session. Instead, demands and expectations on agencies accumulate. Since 2014, the number of new, recurring obligations per year has fluctuated between 115 and 626. Through August 2026, a total of 8,261 obligations were added to city agencies’ dockets. 5,258 of these are explicitly recurring.

One of the Council’s favorite obligations is a report: 1,545 of the 8,261 obligations are reporting requirements, and 847 of them recur at least once a year. That is 67 new recurring reports per year, every year, with no public accounting of which ones arrive, get read, or still serve a purpose.

As I’ve previously written with the case of the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) and their Streets Plan mandates, new obligations and expectations are often being stacked onto agencies without equivalent increases in funding or staffing. This increases the administrative burden on each existing city worker, resulting in a fixed pool of time and energy being increasingly divided among a growing pile of mandated reports.

New York City is not unusual in regard to this growing list of reports and regulations for public agencies. Stanford’s RegLab scanned 500 million words of statute across all 50 states and found California’s reporting requirements grew 400% from 2000 to 2025 and that 30% of California’s ongoing reports may never be filed at all. In Maryland, RegLab found the legislature would need 14 weeks just to read the reports its laws require. The Maryland legislature only meets for a 13-week session.

A handful of agencies carry most of the load

Ten agencies carry six in ten of the Council’s mandates. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene leads with 569 obligations, followed by the Department of Buildings (525), the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (454), the Department of Transportation (424), and Housing Preservation and Development (354). These are the agencies New Yorkers most often complain are slow, and the tracker now unveils one reason why: they are the agencies the Council tasks most heavily.

Interestingly, 477 obligations, over 5% of the total, name no resolvable implementer at all. The law assigns work to “the administering agency”, or simply “an agency designated by the mayor”. An agency employee reading the law cannot tell from its text whether it applies to them. That is a transparency gap written into the laws themselves that can result in confusion, uncertainty for agencies, and unintended impacts.

City Hall and Albany are pruning; the tracker can help

Mayor Mamdani has shown a determination to make NYC run better, and cutting low-value obligations has been central to it. The Commission on Government Efficiency launched in May, the OPEN for Small Business package cut more than 50 rules in July, and Public Interest Technology Crews are now beginning to be embedded with agencies. At the State level, Governor Hochul’s July executive order directs a statewide “regulatory reset” to identify outdated and duplicative rules.

Jackson Gode’s recent essay “So You’re State Capacity Curious” also distills what federal policymakers should take from this movement, and his takeaways can equally apply as a checklist for the NY City Council: define the outcome before drafting the mandate, confirm the agency can actually execute it, streamline existing rules before adding new ones, and reconsider whether a mandatory report is the right instrument at all.

I strongly support the recommendations of his article. But every one of those steps requires knowing what obligations already exist, and I have not previously seen a publicly available database. This new tracker can help identify why an agency is slow or expensive on some task: sometimes the answer is sitting in the stack of 5,258 standing orders. At a minimum, it makes the rules governing agencies legible, and states plainly what each new law will add to the pile.

Not all obligations are bad, but transparency is good

I want to be clear that this tool does not argue against obligations. Regulations are necessary to safeguard the public and give agencies direction on how to achieve what elected officials determine should be prioritized. But it is also true that rulebooks for public bodies have grown so long that such well-intentioned obligations backfire when stacked too high, constricting agencies instead of guiding them. This can sometimes lead to agencies being unable to comply with new mandates when they find their hands tied.

Reports exist because the Council has a duty to oversee agencies; the problem we face now is endlessly stacking these reports without reading or pruning existing ones when possible.

Whether you want more obligations or fewer, transparency and cross-branch communication make government work better. If agencies can see exactly what each new law requires of them, and whether it touches them at all, they can comply faster and better. If Council members can see what they have already demanded of an agency before demanding more, they can write sharper laws. And if the public has an easier way of tracking and understanding new obligations, this may earn more trust in our public institutions.

Explore the tracker

The obligations tracker and its tools are free to browse: the full obligations table, agency workloads, deadline timelines, and a checklist page for every local law since 2014. The data hub for this post has the charts above with downloadable data for members. Members can also sign up for customizable email alerts when new laws create obligations for the agencies, Council members, or topics they wish to follow.

If you work at a city agency and the tracker gets your obligations wrong, or you know of an obligation it missed, please let me know. The extraction is automated, and I correct it as often as I can, but given the volume of legislation, I can’t catch everything. The goal of this tracker is for it to be a ledger that the Council, the agencies, and the public can trust. If you have a request for additional features or tools to be added, please reach out!

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The need for [Community Board] representation remains clear, although the boards’ functioning, as with many government agencies, has struggled to adapt in the 21st century.

• Future of Community Boards Working Group December 2021 report

At a recent meeting of Manhattan Community Board 3, we received some exciting news: the NYC Civic Engagement Commission (CEC) announced it was studying, in partnership with the National Civic League and Perfect City, how it can “help the community improve how public meetings are experienced by residents, elected officials, and municipal staff”.

While the CEC’s work will cover more than community boards, the impact on local governance through improving community board operations in particular has immense potential for public perceptions of government effectiveness. Community boards (CBs) are the base layer of local government in New York, intended to be a primary conduit for neighborhoods to communicate with City agencies and elected officials and vice versa.

Acting as this neighborhood-government connector, CBs are a key actor in bringing community concerns to the attention of those in power and in acting as the voice of the community.

However, CBs are also notorious for their long, inefficient meetings, where members argue over minutiae with no results and discussions on a single topic can drag on for hours. The length of meetings and difficulty in reaching consensus is a frequent complaint I hear from community board members, public attendees, and the agency representatives that present at meetings. CBs are also chronically underfunded; they lack administrative support and professional expertise, and their operations are too often dispersed and ad hoc.1

As a result, CBs often become blockers on much-needed public and private developments, or are simply ignored and worked around as much as possible.

A system in which a key actor is treated as an inconvenience and dreaded or avoided by both public and private actors is not a healthy system. It is in the best interest of the Mayor’s Office, city agencies, and the CBs themselves for the CBs to function better, so that they may better serve the interests of the neighborhood they represent and be a value-adding player in local government.

Given the opportunity of the Civic Engagement Commission’s ongoing study, I would like to present my recommendations for improving community board operations and making them more effective public bodies.

Suggestions to Improve NYC Community Boards

I have organized all the below recommendations into three categories: ensuring community board members are effective, making meetings work more efficiently, and building the structural support that makes both possible.

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1. Step up expectations and support for members

• Enforce parliamentary procedure, with a trained person responsible for it in an executive position on every board. Most boards nominally operate under Robert’s Rules of Order, but enforcement varies wildly by CB Chairs, and meetings drift when it lapses. I wrote a full guide to how Robert’s Rules works at CB meetings because parliamentary fluency is the difference between a meeting that decides things and a meeting that circles endlessly. Boards should be required to appoint a parliamentarian from among their members, and the CEC, which already offers parliamentary procedure training to boards, should provide additional and mandatory training to both parliamentarians and chairs. Current CEC trainings should also be evaluated for effectiveness and new trainings and resources updated to suit members’ needs.

  • A complementary tool should be built by the CEC: an AI assistant trained on Robert’s Rules that chairs and parliamentarians can query mid-meeting to resolve procedural disputes in seconds instead of ten-minute detours. This is a tool any one city office could build once for use by all boards.

  • Further, a properly trained AI agent like this could analyze meeting transcripts to assess compliance with Robert’s Rules and the boards’ bylaws and provide coaching or additional support for the CBs most in need. This can help board parliamentarians to learn from mistakes and improve enforcement, ensuring more efficient meetings.

• Make onboarding mandatory. New members currently learn bylaws and procedures on-the-job, with no training prior to appointment or first meetings. The 2018 charter amendment already tasks the CEC with providing boards urban planning and technical assistance, and the CEC offers trainings on parliamentary procedure, zoning, and language access. What is missing is any requirement to take them. Borough presidents should condition appointment on completing a standard onboarding: how a meeting runs, what a resolution is, how ULURP and the budget process work, and the conflict-of-interest rules.

  • Similarly, CB staff should be provided with both mandatory and surplus optional training on relevant technology, human resources, and development of bylaws and meeting procedures. Centralized training provided through Borough President (BP) Offices or the CEC would standardize best practices across CBs and upskill the limited resources CBs do have.

• Publicly track member attendance and engagement. Mandate that all CBs report members’ attendance at full board and committee meetings, and publicly display attendance rates by member and per board to make tracking easier. Provide resources and support to help CBs quickly remove and replace members who stop attending meetings.

  • The Comptroller’s October 2024 audit of board appointments found borough presidents reappointing members who missed most meetings; a training requirement paired with attendance standards would raise the floor on member engagement.

  • For a carrot to accompany this stick, publicly recognize and award CB members who go above and beyond. Either BP Offices, the CEC, or even the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement should set up awards that CB members can be nominated for in a number of categories like best innovation, community leader, public advocate. Incentivize CB engagement and recognize those who use the position to be pillars of their community.

2. Run meetings like the public’s time matters

• Time all speakers, including board members. Public session speakers at most boards get two or three minutes with a timer. Board members debating a motion often get unlimited time. Robert’s Rules contains the fix, since it allows bodies to set debate limits by standing rule. Boards should cap member speaking time per motion and empower the chair (or a parliamentarian) to enforce it. The Better Public Meetings project’s research argues that state laws governing local meetings offer more procedural flexibility than most bodies realize; boards are freer to redesign their own meetings than they assume.

• Make hybrid attendance permanent and easy. Since 2022, New York’s Open Meetings Law has allowed public bodies to run hybrid meetings, and the statute explicitly lets each community board in NYC make its own determination on videoconferencing. The result is 59 separate policies. Some boards run excellent hybrid meetings while others offer no remote option at all. For working parents, disabled residents, and anyone who cannot give up several hours on a weeknight, remote access is the difference between participating and not.

  • Every board should be mandated to offer virtual attendance options, and the City should fund the equipment and staffing to make it reliable rather than leaving it to each board’s improvisation. A centralized IT/communications team that provides tech support and training to CB staff would go a long way here.

  • Local Law 103 of 2013, which requires City bodies to webcast their meetings live and archive recordings within 72 hours, contains an explicit carve-out stating the law “shall not apply to community boards.” The Charter requires only that boards make meetings “available for” broadcasting. Twelve years later, the exemption has outlived whatever justification it had, since a webcast now requires only a laptop and some microphones with minimal tech setup. The Council should extend Local Law 103 to community boards and pair the requirement with funding for the equipment and training.

• Centralize community board bylaws and create enforcement mechanisms for when they are violated. Currently, every board maintains its own bylaws, leading to a wide variance in how meetings are conducted and a lack of knowledge in appropriate procedure. Centralizing bylaws at the City Charter level would provide consistency with how CBs operate, simplify training and knowledge sharing of best practices, and allow the City to more easily track violations of CB policy.

  • The CEC should also set up an intake process for CB members to report bylaw violations or submit questions for help with figuring out proper procedure. Community boards are city agencies, and just like any other agency, there must be pathways for enforcing the rules and holding members accountable.

3. Give boards the shared infrastructure they have never had

• Build permanent CB support divisions in each borough president’s office. Borough presidents appoint board members and are the closest thing boards have to an oversight body, but support is inconsistent across boroughs and administrations. The Manhattan Borough President’s office runs a training series for board members; other boroughs offer less. Los Angeles shows what institutionalized support looks like: its 99 Neighborhood Councils are backed by a permanent city agency, the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, which handles training, funding administration, and elections citywide, and every member takes state-mandated training on managing public funds. New York should charter the equivalent: a permanent division in each borough president’s office responsible for board oversight, training, and shared services, so that support survives changes in administration.

  • Alternatively, create a Central Staff team in the new Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement, or a dedicated (in complement to the appointed) staff at the CEC, that assists the boards and District Managers with matters ranging from human resources to onboarding new board members. As the FCBWG report says, “The boards also need consistent access to technology, functional office space, and expertise in land use and zoning.” A dedicated team in the BPs’ or Mayor’s office could standardize such support while also providing oversight.

  • Social media training, funding, and support should also be added to the existing catalog of trainings. CBs could better engage with the public if they utilized social media platforms, but CB staff need training in order to do so.

• Stand up one tech platform instead of 59. The City Council runs its entire legislative operations, votes, and bill text on one shared Legistar system. Community boards each improvise their own stack of websites, mailing lists, and spreadsheets. The Future of Community Boards Working Group reported in December 2021 that all 59 boards relied on a single person for IT support, and one district manager spent roughly $185,000 over five years piecing together technology for a single board. A centralized platform for agendas, minutes, resolutions, and complaint tracking, built once and maintained by the City, would cost a fraction of 59 separate efforts and make every board’s records searchable in one place.2

  

• Publish a public dashboard on how every board is doing. The City Charter requires each board to maintain a website with meeting notices and twelve months of minutes, and the Open Meetings Law requires minutes within two weeks of a meeting. But these requirements are only the bare minimum, and more information should be posted. A public dashboard, run by the borough presidents or the CEC, should track for every board: average meeting length, member attendance, whether minutes are posted on time, whether resolutions are accessible online, and whether the board offers hybrid attendance. The metrics should be anchored to goals each borough president sets for their boards, such as how many members of the public attend meetings.

  • Another extension of this recommendation would be for the CEC or each BP’s office to distill insights from this dashboard and other data collected from CBs as best practices shared with every CB staff and members. Top performing CBs should be recognized and their successes copied. Another opportunity for awards!

• Fund the boards so they can actually operate and improve. Every structural fix above runs into the same constraint: In FY2026, the 59 boards’ budgets total $21.9 million, a median of $370,150 per board, with the lowest at $276,449. That works out to roughly $2.50 per district resident per year for the body charged with representing them, about two hundredths of one percent of the city budget. The Future of Community Boards Working Group reported that boards had not received a significant baseline budget increase since 2014, with a typical board allocated $231,100 for its entire staff. The Charter allows boards to hire planners and professional staff, but only “within the budgetary appropriations therefor,” which in practice means most boards weigh in on complex land use applications with no planner on staff. A meaningful baseline increase, enough for every board to employ a full-time urban planner or other expert alongside its district manager, would cost the City less than $15 million a year and transform the quality of the advice boards give on the land use decisions the Charter assigns them.

Conclusion

Despite the many inefficiencies, chronic underfunding, and ignorance of their existence by the majority of NYC residents, community boards remain important elements of local governance. The State relies on community boards to process liquor license applications, City agencies rely on community boards to signal community support or rejection of proposed changes to be made to streets and parks and landmarks, and residents rely on community boards to direct and amplify complaints and requests to the appropriate city officials.

Without a doubt, community boards play an essential role in connecting residents and communities to the many complex organs of City and State government. However, their lack of transparency to those same communities and their unstandardized, inconsistent mode of operation hinder their value.

Adopting any of the above recommendations, done through a mix of City Charter reform (a great opportunity for the Mayor to create another Charter Revision Commission) and Borough Presidents’ backing, could have massive benefits to the operations of the city government at the most local level. Even with community boards’ small, advisory role in government, their perception by the communities they represent plays an outsized role in the public’s perceived effectiveness of the City. A government that can be better trusted and relied upon to serve its citizens is one that will experience more success in implementing policies overall.

Lastly, as mentioned above, the CEC is currently conducting a public survey and research process on how to improve public meetings in NYC. For those who would like to share their own thoughts, here is guidance from the CEC on how to get involved:

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Any opinions expressed below are solely my own and do not represent the views of Manhattan Community Board 3.

Find your community district and key information about it here.

Manhattan Community Board 3 Jul 2026 Full Board Meeting

Tuesday, Jul 28, 2026 - 6:30pm

Beacon Center at MS 131 - 100 Hester St

Meeting Highlights:

• Board leadership changes: MCB3’s Chair is stepping down, with the First Vice Chair moving into the Chair role and the Second Vice Chair becoming First Vice Chair. A special election will be held to fill the Second Vice Chair seat.

• Canal Street redesign split into two phases: Phase 1, from Broadway to West Street and including a two-way bike lane, will be implemented by this fall. Phase 2 will follow next summer or fall to allow for more community input.

• ConEd grid work coming to the LES: ConEd is launching a three-year load transfer between its Avenue A and Cherry Street substations to build out grid resiliency, citing extreme summer heat, energy demand forecasts, and continued development in the neighborhood. Work may cause obstructions, and ConEd will release a one-page FAQ soon.

• Harold Hunter Court: The Parks Committee passed a resolution supporting naming the multi-purpose field in the northwest corner of Tompkins Square Park “Harold Hunter Court.”

Notes from board meeting:

Public Session

• Climate scientist concerned with the increased occurrence of inclement weather and other risks driven by climate change

  • removal of climate data and community services by the government is also of concern

  • looking to connect with other community members to discuss actions to take

  • contact Kylie at kylie.m.sustainability@gmail.com if you are interested or want to learn more!

• ArtBridge does murals around NYC, part of their goal is to cover eyesores like construction fencing with public art

  • currently working with ConEd on a building on Avenue A, between 5th and 6th Streets, to beautify a wall covered in graffiti

• ConEd is doing a load transfer between substations (Avenue A to Cherry Street) to build out the resiliency of the electric grid in the LES

  • necessary given the extreme hot summers of recent years, current energy demand forecasts, and the continued development of the LES

  • 3-year project, work may cause some obstructions in the meantime

  • 1-pager FAQ with more information is currently being created and will be released by ConEd soon

• Speaker from NYC Commission on Racial Equity introducing the office

  • created as a voter initiative in 2022 to hold government accountable to advancing racial equity in NYC

  • community equity priorities are used by agencies to inform two-year strategies on how they will advance racial equity

Elected Officials Reports

• Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Liaison

  • Representative from Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement (OME)

    • OME was created two days after Mayor Mamdani assumed office

    • working on building up the structure of the office and how it will support community boards

    • currently focused on tenants’ rights, planning to do political education town halls called NYC 101

• Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal’s Liaison

  • Updates on the Legionnaire’s Disease outbreak on the Upper East Side

  • Travel advisory through Wednesday due to heavy rains and wind

• Assemblymember Grace Lee’s Liaison

  • Hosting mobile office hours across Lower Manhattan - exact details to come out in social media posts/newsletter from the Assemblymember

  • Giving out free backpacks and other resources at an event on 8/21 - more details to be released soon

• Assemblymember Deborah Glick’s Liaison

  • Free school meals for NYC children 18 and younger, more information here

  • Community health advocates can help people find new health coverage, resolve medical debt, and any matters dealing with insurance companies

• Assemblymember Keith Powers’ Liaison

  • Clean Streets day of action on 7/31

  • Recycling event on 8/2

  • Mobile office hours on 8/4

  • Coffee with Keith event on 8/28 10-11:30 AM

• Councilmember Christopher Martre’s Liaison

  • 10 hour hearing held on CM Martre’s bill to ban horse carriages

• Councilmember Harvey Epstein’s Liaison

  • Co-authored an op-ed about the horse carriage ban with CM Martre

  • Hosting outreach events about student loans, including addressing recent changes to student loans regulations

  • Hang with Harvey event at Washington Square Park, 7/29 4-6 PM

Board Reports

• Board Chair’s Report

  • State Open Meeting Law and MCB3’s resolution passed in May 2022 state which circumstances allow board members to attend meetings remotely

    

  • MCB3 Chair is stepping down from the position; First Vice Chair is stepping into the Board Chair role

    • Second Vice Chair is stepping into the First Vice Chair role, there will be a special election for the Second Vice Chair role

• District Manager’s Report

  • No full board meeting in August, no committee meetings in August except SLA and Cannabis Task Force

  • New portal for outdoor dining applications is difficult to use, even compared to other city portals

  • On 9/21, MCB3 will have a Charter-mandated meeting to hear from all in the district on budget priorities

    • encourage anyone in the district to come and talk about what they think deserves attention

Committee Reports

See Committee Meeting recordings here!

• Parks, Recreation, Waterfront, & Resiliency

  • Resolution on naming the multi-purpose field in the northwest corner of Tompkins Square Park to “Harold Hunter Court”

    

• Transportation, Public Safety, & Environment

  • Chinatown Connections update: funding came in from the state

    • expect to vote on the project in the fall

  • Delancey Street construction project will start next spring

  • Canal Street Redesign has been broken into two phases

    • Phase 1 will be implemented by this fall, Broadway to West Street, including a two-way bike lane

    • Phase 2 will be implemented next summer/fall to gather more community input

• Landmarks

  • Resolution to support approving certificate of appropriateness for Middle Collegiate Church to create greenspace at 112 Second Avenue

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The benefits that current Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude can provide as tool builders are particularly powerful relative to the current frustratingly outdated methods used for many government functions. Governments run in many ways on unstructured text (regulations, forms, case files, transcripts), and that is exactly the context in which LLMs can thrive.

The question now is whether government institutions are ready to embrace this evolution in how they build, which will require adapting operations to take advantage of the new fast-paced builds unlocked by AI tools. Currently, the rules and processes that govern how bureaucratic teams function make it exceedingly difficult to do so.

As said in her excellent post on government reform,

AI is not a miracle tool that will solve every problem in government bureaucracy. Just like computers, the Internet, phones, and all other previous technological advancements, there are good uses and bad uses.

But the capabilities of these models to enhance state capacity with proper use and guidance is now too large to ignore. Not adapting ways of work in government to quickly adopt AI in the public sector will only result in continued failure to provide practical solutions to any of today’s most pressing problems.

In future posts I will dive deeper into individual applications of AI-driven state capacity transformation, and look at specific examples in New York and elsewhere. I would like this article to serve as a catalog and starting point for where public agencies, legislatures, and any other policy institution can harness the power of the latest AI models for the public good.

The following use cases, already being implemented by many public bodies locally and nationally, can serve as examples for all government bodies to follow for building out state capacity in the 21st century.

Improving Public Service Delivery

Problem:

Eligible residents routinely fail to receive benefits they qualify for. Application backlogs, multi-week call center waits, eligibility rules written at a college reading level, and English-only forms create what researchers call “time tax” and drive benefits churn (people losing coverage at renewal despite still qualifying). SNAP, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and housing vouchers are all well-known examples.

For example, SNAP is one federal program with one set of rules. Yet in 2019, only ten states enrolled 100% of eligible people, and the national average was 82% of eligible people enrolled. Wyoming reached just 55% of its eligible population.

How AI Can Help:

• Multilingual benefits navigators that answer eligibility questions at 2am in a resident’s first language, reducing call center load.

• Document and case processing that clears determination backlogs (verifying pay stubs, IDs, residency proofs) so caseworkers can focus on judgment calls.

• Caseworker copilots that surface the relevant policy clause mid-call instead of forcing a transfer.

• Plain-language rewrites of denial notices and renewal letters, which are a leading cause of avoidable churn.

• Examples: Code for America and Nava’s benefits work, California and Minnesota’s eligibility modernization, and philanthropy-funded pilots.

How to mitigate risk:

Keep a human in the loop on any denial or adverse determination. AI can triage and draft cases and responses but never issue the final “no.” Disclose to residents when they are talking to a bot, audit outputs for disparate error rates across language and demographic groups, and protect PII at the model layer. Build a clean human fallback for every automated path.

Procurement and Contracting

Problem:

The arcane rules that determine how government buys things is one of the deepest sources of our present dysfunction. The procurement process is slow, expensive, and stacked against small vendors. NYC is one of the worst offenders in this case: in FY2024, it registered 85% of its non-profit contract value late. That is a number that has only been trending worse with each passing year.

Even in ideal cases, procurement cycles routinely run a year or more, requirements are written in ways that lock out small and newer vendors, and the paperwork burden means agencies often re-buy what they already have or stick with incumbents because switching is too painful.

Procurement is the chokepoint on nearly every other reform; you can’t deliver a better service if it takes 18 months to contract the software. The same dysfunction that AI tools could help fix is what blocks government from adopting them, making this one of the most important domains to address. Of course, some procedural unblocking will need to be done first.

How AI Can Help:

• Drafting and standardizing RFPs and scopes of work from a plain-language description of what an agency needs, cutting weeks off the front end.

• Summarizing and comparing vendor bids against stated criteria so evaluation committees spend their time on judgment, not on reading hundreds of pages.

• Flagging waste, duplicate contracts, and improper payments by scanning spending data across agencies.

• Simplifying vendor onboarding and registration, the step that disproportionately screens out small and minority-owned businesses.

• So, so much more.

How to mitigate risk:

Award decisions stay with human evaluators and must remain auditable and challengeable; AI ranks and summarizes options, but it does not pick winners. Watch for models that quietly favor incumbents or large vendors whose documentation is more polished, and keep procurement integrity rules (conflict-of-interest, transparency) fully intact around any automation.

Improved transparency and advocacy

Problem:

Government is hard to watch from the outside, and even harder to understand and interpret. Open data portals are technical, regulations are written in legal jargon, and even seemingly simple processes span multiple agencies with no single map. The result is people feeling abandoned or antagonized by systems intended to help them.

AI can reshape work outside the public sector too. It is being utilized by journalists, advocates, and capable citizens to investigate government data and shed light on systems that are difficult to understand or follow from the outside. Asking agents to answer questions based on specific government websites, databases, or even looking at city charters or state constitutions has proven to be effective.

It is easier for anyone to work with and understand government open data portals, to have lawyer-jargon regulations and laws explained to them, to create maps and diagrams of complex government processes For example, look at this beautiful visual from Vital City breaking down an example of the process a building permit goes through in NYC:

How AI Can Help:

• Plain-language explanation of laws, regulations, charters, and constitutions for non-lawyers.

• Building maps and diagrams of opaque processes.

• Interactive document explorers over City Council, state legislature, and Congressional transcripts and data.

• Taking transcripts and data from the New York City Council up to the U.S. Congress and producing summaries and interactive document explorers to help the public track and engage with all levels of government.

And of course I have to plug my own tool, Block Party, where our team has been working to increase awareness and engagement of NYC community boards meetings and resolutions.

How to mitigate risk:

Hallucination is the central risk when AI explains the law to the public. Model responses must always cite source documents, link back to primary sources, and frame outputs as starting points to verify rather than authoritative legal advice. More work will need to be done to address the equity gap: the people best positioned to use these tools are often already the most engaged.

Workforce and Institutional Knowledge

Problem:

State capacity is ultimately about people, and the public workforce is stretched thin, aging, and losing institutional knowledge as experienced staff retire. New hires onboard slowly because the knowledge they need lives in colleagues’ heads or in scattered, outdated manuals. Every other use case in this post runs through these same overstretched employees. Augmenting their knowledge and talent with AI tools is capacity-building in the most direct sense.

How AI Can Help:

• Copilots that help civil servants draft memos, navigate internal policy, and answer routine questions without pulling a senior colleague off their own work.

• Capturing and making searchable the institutional knowledge of departing employees before they leave.

• Faster onboarding through tools that let new hires query “how do we do X here” and get an accurate, sourced answer.

• Offloading rote tasks (data entry, summarizing case files, scheduling) that drive burnout and turnover.

How to mitigate risk:

These tools must be used as augmentation and not for headcount reduction. Using them as a path to layoffs would only degrade the inputs, skills, and verifications that the AI tools depend on. As with all the other use cases, validate internal answers against authoritative sources.

Cutting Through Red Tape and Streamlining Processes

Problem:

We currently face a crisis of effectiveness in government, and AI is coming at the right time to help reduce procedural bloat, revamp government systems, and aid both local and federal bodies to better govern.

Regulatory codes accumulate over time but rarely get pruned, leaving duplicative, contradictory, or obsolete rules on the books. Application systems are fragmented across agencies, so a business opening a restaurant files the same information five times to five offices.

One example is the Code of Federal Regulations, which has grown from 9,745 pages in 1950 to 194,395 today, roughly twentyfold, and holding about 1.08 million distinct restrictions. To expect any process subject to these federal regulations to be able to move quickly when subjected to so many restrictions is unrealistic.

Excitingly, Governor Hochul recently announced a partnership to do this exact kind of outdated code-cutting in New York.

How AI Can Help:

• Inventorying and mapping an entire regulatory regime to flag duplicative or dead rules for human review.

• Pre-scanning applications to alert applicants to likely problem areas and forecasting realistic timelines.

• Unifying separated application portals into one front door. Even where the consolidation itself is not AI, AI can sit on top: a single conversational intake that routes a request to the right agencies and pre-fills downstream forms from one set of answers.

• Automating routine internal paperwork (data entry, cross-referencing, status updates) that consumes staff hours.

How to mitigate risk:

AI flags candidate rules to cut; humans and the proper rulemaking process decide. Don’t let “the model said it was redundant” become a shortcut around required public comment or legal review. Pilot on one agency before scaling, and keep an audit trail of what was changed and why. Of course, proper training and development of back-end structures like connected data pipelines and cleaned databases is necessary for such benefits to be unlocked.

Policy Evaluation

Problem:

Government rarely checks whether its own laws and programs work. Retrospective review of enacted legislation or policies is exceedingly rare, evaluation data is scattered across agencies, and fiscal projections are rarely revisited against actual outcomes.

Take the NYC Council, which passes many laws carrying large fiscal impacts on the city budget every year. Rarely are the estimated costs of their legislation actually verified, and never is the body held accountable for these costs stacked onto agencies every year. Tools like my NYC Fiscal Impact Statement tracker can help with oversight and evaluation of legislation.

Relatedly, test-and-learn is another big area of opportunity. Laws are usually enacted with little advance testing, so edge cases and unintended consequences are discovered only after they cause harm, often years into implementation. As Pahlka mentioned in her post, “If an advocate can stress-test a policy against thousands of edge cases before it gets enacted, the standard for what counts as due diligence in lawmaking starts to move”.

How AI Can Help:

• Synthesizing program outcome data across agencies to estimate what is actually working.

• Scanning thousands of pages of audits, reports, and agency filings to surface underperforming or redundant programs.

• Natural-language querying of administrative datasets so a staffer can ask a question instead of commissioning a study.

• Stress-testing draft legislation against thousands of hypothetical scenarios and edge cases before enactment.

• Red-teaming proposed rules: prompting a model to find the loopholes, perverse incentives, and groups a draft accidentally excludes.

• Rapid drafting and iteration so legislative staff can revise text and immediately re-test.

How to mitigate risk:

AI surfaces correlations, not causation – so treat its output only as leads to investigate. Keep methodology transparent, validate against ground-truth data, and guard against optimizing for whatever metric is easiest to measure rather than what matters.

Simulations are only as good as their assumptions, so they supplement real-world piloting rather than replace it. Document the assumptions behind any stress test, and treat surprising results as questions for experts and not conclusions.

Conclusion

The first step for state capacity to improve is to recognize that better tools and solutions exist. My hope with this article is to surface how AI has rapidly changed the solution set on what it takes to solve current challenges in the public realm. The above examples highlight just a portion of the possibilities.

For public bodies like city agencies or state governments to truly harness these new possibilities, the way our institutions function will have to change. Procurement processes and regulations determining how civil servants work must be updated.

We need to develop frameworks that allow for the rapid implementation of AI in government, and in public adoption of privately created civic technology, while mitigating risks. Refusing to recognize or utilize new technology because of its potential downsides does not work. Neither will trying to integrate this new technology with outdated ways of work, which will only block the benefits and amplify the downsides.

We also need more and better legislation to construct a coherent AI policy, in New York and nationally. Agencies, local governing bodies, and individuals can all benefit from AI being integrated into digital service delivery and other public services, but the wide scope of impact requires deliberate construction of processes.

Ignoring AI and not passing any legislation regarding proper use or failing to set-up systems to respond to potential labor market fallout is becoming increasingly dangerous for trust and confidence in public institutions.

How these AI models will continue to develop and what new tools and use cases will be possible just months from now is anyone’s guess. But what’s clear is that they are already capable enough to support and enhance government goals from policy research and writing to digital public service delivery and even the tricky regulations space.

More and more, state capacity will become synonymous with the implementation of these types of tools by both independent actors and government itself.

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I recently published an article through Streetsblog on why Clinton Street requires a street redesign to deal with its overwhelming traffic volumes. Please read the piece here!

With permission, I am publishing below a longer version of that article. Consider the Streetsblog version the what-you-need-to-know, and this Substack version a deeper dive that includes more discussion of Low Traffic Neighborhood design principles and additional Clinton Street traffic data.

The Lower East Side (LES) in Manhattan is one of the most dense, walkable neighborhoods in New York City. Take a stroll around its historic streets – Orchard Street, Ludlow Street, Essex Street, and so on – and regardless of the time of day or season of the year, you will see the sidewalks full of pedestrians.

In fact, the LES streets are famously and historically known for their lively street activity. And while the neighborhood is not quite as crowded as it was in those peak 20th-century immigration days, lively streets remain a LES hallmark. Yet the design of the streets themselves does not support the needs or current utilization by residents, over 80% of whom do not own a car.

One particularly egregious case is the segment of Clinton Street between Delancey Street and Houston Street. This single corridor receives 4-6x the vehicular traffic of its neighboring streets, despite being of a similar width and packed with pedestrians due to its mixed-use nature, boasting both commercial and residential uses.

Clinton Street cannot continue to manage 16,000 cars per day entering it. The astonishingly high volume of vehicular traffic on this road, combined with its equally high usage by pedestrians and cyclists, has resulted in a dangerous and untenable situation. Intersections on this corridor have been rife with crashes resulting in pedestrian injuries, and locals encounter traffic jams throughout the day, impeding residents’ mobility and worsening quality of life for those with and without a car.

I’ve written before about how the LES is a prime location for a Low Traffic Neighborhood (LTN). LTNs achieve less traffic (including on the boundary roads they funnel cars towards) and fewer casualties simultaneously by redesigning residential streets using proven urban planning principles. The strategic arrangement of local roads allows for flexibility in each neighborhood’s LTN design by removing dangerous through-traffic while prioritizing residents’ needs. You can read more about what LTNs are and the evidence on how they improve the health, safety, and economic outcomes for residents here.

In this post, I would like to make the case for why Clinton Street presents an excellent candidate for an LTN redesign. By making a few minor but pivotal changes to the design of the roadway, the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) could transform life for both residents and the many tourists and visitors who frequent this street in the heart of the LES. Key to this is one simple change: removing vehicle access from a single point on Clinton Street.

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The Primary Culprit: The Williamsburg Bridge Off-Ramp

Anyone who lives in the LES or has spent time around the section of the City around Delancey Street can immediately point to why traffic on Clinton Street is so much higher than neighboring streets: the Williamsburg Bridge off-ramp. For vehicles traversing this East River bridge from Brooklyn’s Williamsburg to Manhattan’s LES, the first opportunity to exit the bridge roadway is to make a right turn onto Clinton Street.

Drivers coming off the four-lane road on the bridge turn directly onto a one-lane, one-way roadway shared with a bike path and busy sidewalks on either side. This leads to a dangerous situation where cars are often barreling onto the local road or speeding through the red light entirely. On that same off-ramp are heavily utilized crosswalks and bike paths often packed with cyclists and pedestrians navigating the Williamsburg Bridge entrance themselves. Further, in the immediate area are dozens of bars, restaurants, a public school (P.S. 140), and a public park (Hamilton Fish Park).

The result has been dozens of crashes leading to dozens of pedestrian, cyclist, and motorist injuries as well as a handful of fatalities in the past decade. The Clinton-Delancey intersection is one of the most dangerous in all of the LES. And while the Mayor made headlines in his first week by paving over the infamous Williamsburg Bridge bike bump, nothing has been done to address the situation at the nearby intersections that have caused a constant stream of injuries and deaths.

A Small, Residential Street Clogged With Pass-Through Traffic

The Williamsburg Bridge carries a major thoroughfare, connecting to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, thus providing one of the primary means of car travel between Manhattan and Brooklyn. This means there is a constant procession of traffic trying to utilize this off-ramp, as multiple lanes of traffic converge onto this single-lane road.

During many hours of the day, drivers do not actually enter speedily onto Clinton Street, because there is simply too much traffic to allow doing so. Using the DOT’s data, we can see that there are elevated vehicle counts on this segment of the Williamsburg Bridge crossing Clinton Street throughout the entire typical weekday. Despite being a one-way road, the corridor sees at least double, and compared to many other streets, 4-10x the amount of cars as bordering roads.

The vast majority of these cars are not driven by residents. The latest US Census ACS data shows that only 5.5% of LES residents commute to work by car. At the same time, among the top 311 complaints for Clinton Street are: illegal parking, street/sidewalk noise, for-hire vehicle complaints, and traffic. Residents are suffering from the noise and crowdedness effects of a small street being used by pass-through traffic without benefitting from the roadway access.

Of course, there are many more businesses and restaurants on Clinton St compared to the neighboring streets like Attorney and Norfolk. Trucks supplying these restaurants and customers taking cars or rideshares to frequent these stores undoubtedly contribute to the traffic volume. But ultimately, the data shows vehicles coming off the bridge are by far the biggest factor contributing to current conditions. A redesign of the street, particularly reducing Williamsburg Bridge traffic turning onto Clinton Street, could dramatically improve living standards while maintaining access to delivery and emergency vehicles.

Clinton Street Is Primed for a Low Traffic Neighborhood Redesign

A few minor changes to the road to reduce congestion along Clinton Street can make it a safer, more enjoyable pedestrian experience while simultaneously improving accessibility for residents and trucks supplying businesses. This is the concept embodied by LTNs, which propose cost-effective street redesigns utilizing paint on the ground and cheap flexposts to re-route traffic.

The benefits of LTNs are numerous. According to Open Plans, previous LTNs have resulted in a 46.9% drop in overall traffic volume and a 1.6% decrease on boundary roads. They have led to 50% reduction in car-related casualties, a 10-18% reduction in crime, 5.7% decrease in the concentration of nitrogen dioxide, and 25% more active travel. In London, LTNs prevented 37 deaths and half a million sick days annually. Redirecting vehicles that would have used Clinton Street simply to pass through to other neighborhoods could bring similar benefits to the LES.

Directly north of this section of Clinton Street, when it crosses Houston Street, it becomes Avenue B. In my previous post arguing for an Avenue B LTN, I wrote about how Avenue B is a diverse, dense urban street featuring an amalgamation of public schools, restaurants and bars, community gardens, and homes (sound familiar?). DOT Street User Count data found an average of 5x as many pedestrians on Avenue B as cars at peak hours, and equal numbers of bikes as cars. Residents have also shown a desire for improved pedestrian access, with 65% of 2021 Vision Survey respondents wanting the avenue to be permanently redesigned to be more pedestrian-friendly.

While the same data is not available for the southern portion of Avenue B (Clinton Street), it is a safe assumption that the street utilization and NYC DOT survey results are just as true for the same road in the blocks south of Houston Street as they are in the blocks just north of it. Yet while Avenue B is receiving an extensive redesign by the DOT, no changes are planned for Clinton Street right next door.

The major plank of Clinton Street’s redesign should be the removal of the dangerous Manhattan-bound Williamsburg Bridge off-ramp onto Clinton Street. Vehicles desiring to turn north into Manhattan can instead be routed onto Essex Street and Allen Street. These nearby streets can safely accommodate a much higher volume of traffic. Clinton Street itself would remain open to local residents and delivery vehicles, but without the endless procession of pass-through traffic clogging roads and endangering pedestrians.

Establishing permanent LTNs provides the greatest potential for pedestrian safety and permanent improvement in residential livability while capitalizing on cost-efficient solutions and lower administrative overhead in the long term. DOT should extend its current Avenue B redesign several blocks south (the current proposal covers East 4th to East 12th Streets) and include the connected Clinton Street segment down to Delancey Street.

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Given just two hours to build, my expectations for actual results were low. But as each team showcased their projects at the end of the night, I, along with the rest of the audience, was struck by a realization: AI has completely transformed development timelines, and skilled technologists guided by experienced public servants can now construct solutions to long-standing government gaps in a matter of hours.

Read more here about our takeaways from the event and project highlights. Projects ranged from a playable 311 complaints videogame to a dashboard mapping NYC flood burden against flood-resilience capital spending to an encyclopedia of NYC civic data. Subscribe to the State Capacity Ecosystem (SCE) Substack for updates on future hackathons and other events.

State Capacity Ecosystem

AI should be a tool for inclusive building. It’s time for government to claim it.

At our State Capacity hackathon last week, a team used NYC OpenData and AI to build a dashboard that maps every flood in New York City against every dollar the city has committed to flood resilience including a live replay of a real storm from May 20th, with sensors lighting up across the boroughs and subway lines going red as floodwaters hit the tracks…

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3 months ago · 2 likes · State Capacity Ecosystem Team

It has never been easier for individuals to affect change and solve problems for the public. Anyone with access to an AI model and a willingness to explore the available data can plug in holes where there are missing public services or address information gaps.

Of course, building a new tech tool is only one part of the process for any project aimed at public adoption. The hard part of deploying government software is the unglamorous part: data privacy, security review, accessibility/508 compliance, integration with legacy systems, uptime, and maintenance after the volunteer moves on. But the outdated and overly complex rules that govern deployment in government, and make all these steps excruciatingly drawn out and confusing, is exactly the problem.

The SCE Substack article covers this new paradigm and its implications, and where we see our new community playing a role. In this post, I wanted to address some additional thoughts I had following the hackathon about what it means for state capacity moving forward.

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Government needs more tech-driven builders

State capacity is the government’s ability to actually do what it sets out to do, from issuing a permit to running a benefits program. It is well-known that across local, state, and federal government, state capacity in the U.S. has fallen behind the public’s needs. A multitude of public institutions are largely unable to achieve their stated goals in a timely, cost-effective, or consistent manner.

The good news is that there is a growing ecosystem of practitioners, technologists, researchers, funders, civic organizations, and public sector actors all working on adjacent aspects of institutional effectiveness and public sector innovation. Momentum has been growing to bring government institutions into the 21st-century and prepare it to tackle the problems of the future.

However, this ecosystem remains fragmented and each of the component actors are weakly connected. As a result, promising solutions are diffusing far too slowly.

Operational knowledge is not widely shared and organizations duplicate efforts needlessly. Extraordinary talent struggles to identify pathways into the work while local implementation capacity develops unevenly. Public institutions are unable to access or implement the solutions created by external actors. Private actors are unable to work directly with relevant public bodies.

This coordination problem is what inspired Henry, Jeremie, and me to create the State Capacity Ecosystem Hub. Our hope is that people will use our new tool to discover new opportunities to plug-in to the state capacity ecosystem, surface new connections to address major policy needs, and ultimately form a more cohesive network of actors that can coordinate and collaborate on their work and its uses in the public sphere.

The system is ripe for change

At our hackathon, over 20 teams of civic tech builders launched their own AI-driven solutions to various state capacity problems. As verified by the public sector experts present, many of these projects created valuable solutions to real needs that government has been unable to address itself for many years now.

Building tools that facilitate digital service delivery, information transparency, and allow for public advocacy is now easier than ever. The new bottleneck is in adoption: a fragmented ecosystem, and on the government side a broken procurement and implementation pipeline, mean that these valuable tools never reach the agencies that need them.

As Jennifer Pahlka writes in her piece here, we need faster and smarter procurement that preserves the necessary safeguards, so that new and changing technology applications, like using AI to fix websites and government tools, can actually be implemented instead of relying on vendors to make changes, which takes months and costs ridiculous amounts. Technology itself can even be used to fix procurement rules (such as by identifying where they are needlessly complex or redundant), but you need to update those rules in the first place to allow government to unlock the value of AI and new technologies.

The key to improving state capacity moving forward, then, is two-fold:

1. unshackling agencies and other government bodies to easily adopt and adapt tools built by outsiders (and to more easily develop and deploy their own tools)

2. designing these AI-driven, citizen-created tools to be implementable by public bodies, which includes ensuring they are carefully designed even as they are rapidly built

Whether it’s an agency adopting someone’s interactive dashboard built on open data or a legislative body integrating a meeting transcriber and summarizer into its archives, the new opportunities for crowd-sourced enhancements of government capabilities are energizing.

But to achieve this, we need an organized, concentrated push to reform government processes to allow them to speedily adopt modern solutions to long-standing problems. And we need more interaction and dialogue between civic tech builders and government practitioners. Only through this dialogue can we construct pathways for adopting AI-driven tools that handle the tricky questions of accountability and ownership of maintenance.

To figure out the proper answers to these questions, we need to experiment and learn and iterate. Our hackathon event and the SCE hub are only the beginnings of our work to bring about this new era of state capacity that will be defined by greater collaboration between civic technologists and government institutions.

In addition to expanding the hub, we are planning to host more events like the state capacity hackathon that create opportunities for technologists and government practitioners to directly share ideas and build solutions together.

If these possibilities are enticing to you, come join the movement and help us create more capable governments and more democratic institutions. Let’s grab coffee, connect virtually, swap ideas, or collaborate on projects. Let’s work together to make government work better.

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Any opinions expressed below are solely my own and do not represent the views of Manhattan Community Board 3.

Find your community district and key information about it here.

Manhattan Community Board 3 Jun 2026 Full Board Meeting

Tuesday, Jun 23, 2026 - 6:30pm

PS 20 - 166 Essex Street

Meeting Highlights:

• Welcome new members of Manhattan Community Board 3!

Notes from board meeting:

Public Session

• Owner of Mary O’s has been threatened with being ticketed by an unknown individual for having lines that go out onto the sidewalk

  • District Manager confirmed that Mary O’s is not breaking the law

• Residents spoke against the opening of a new 24/7 intake center in the district due to possibility of crime and danger it could bring to the neighborhood

  • residents requesting more information and to have a voice in the decision to open this intake center

Elected Officials Reports

• District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s Liaison

  • 147 guns bought back at the recent gun buy back event, most in Manhattan history

• Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal’s Liaison

  • Two World Cup watch parties happening in Manhattan hosted by the BP’s office:

    • Central Park, 5 PM, Bahamas vs England

    • United Palace, 7:30 PM, Colombia vs Portugal

• Assemblymember Grace Lee’s Liaison

  • State budget was extremely overdue this year, is now done but came in much later than expected

• Assemblymember Keith Powers’ Liaison

  • Highlighted four pieces of legislation that passed in the most recent session

• State Senator Brian Kavanagh’s Liaison

  • Passed 38 bills through the State Senate this year

  • This year’s State budget includes over $1 billion in capital funding

  • Maximum income threshold for SCRIE and DRIE Rent Freeze programs moved from $50,000 to $75,000

• Councilmember Harvey Epstein - attended!

Board Reports

• District Manager’s Report

  • Reminder that community boards are city agencies, making community board members part-time public servants

  • City is working with MCB3 to resolve the delivery bike workers situation on E 7th Street

    • no known solution yet, but the current administration is working on it, including finding a better long-term solution for bike storage

Committee Reports

See Committee Meeting recordings here!

• Parks, Recreation, Waterfront, & Resiliency

  • Resolution in support of naming a section of Tompkins Square Park after skateboarder Harold Hunter will likely come next month, awaiting guidance from NYC Parks on the proper way to rename a section of a park

• Transportation, Public Safety, & Environment

  • DOT presented on their new e-bike charging initiative

    • 25 sites across the city, 5 in MCB3 propose with 2-3 likely to be selected

  • Two new inter-city bus stop applications applying to make stops in MCB3, one coming from Cincinnati, Ohio and the other from Atlantic City, New Jersey

• Health, Seniors, & Human Services / Youth, Education, & Human Rights

  • Newly opened housing for seniors 55+ years old who are formerly homeless and for survivors of domestic violence on E 2nd Street

• Land Use, Zoning, Public & Private Housing

  • Resolution involving recommendations for what to include in an RFP for management of the Essex Street market

• Landmarks Committee

  • Resolution supporting the replacement of deteriorated vinyl windows with aluminum windows at St. Nicholas of Myra Orthodox Church

  • Resolution approving continuing maintenance plan required for air rights transfer to 50-64 Third Avenue from St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery

    • this is the first time this process is occurring, with newly relaxed requirements for the air rights transfer process under City of Yes!

• Cannabis Task Force

  • Resolution to approve the cannabis license for MAD GIO & Proper Prints LLC at 68 Clinton Street

• Personnel Task Force

  • Two resolutions for MCB3 staff salary increases for the community associates, to provide a $2,000 raise

    • Senior Community Associate: $56,423 → $58,423

    • Community Associate: $50,000 → $52,000

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New York City may be in its most pro-building era since the passage of the reigning zoning resolution in 1961.

One piece of evidence that we are in this new, pro-housing and pro-transit growth era can be found in messaging by both the current Governor and Mayor: Hochul’s Let Them Build program and Mamdani’s relentless hammering on the affordability crisis issue while campaigning (and continuing on through today). It is no coincidence that the Mayor was swept to victory on this platform and that the Governor appears poised to do the same this fall.

For further evidence, just take a look at a partial selection of recent and planned progress on transit and housing:

Transit:

• The 7 train extension to Hudson Yards (and all of present-day Hudson Yard’s towers)

• Phase 1 & 2 of the Second Avenue Subway

• The Interborough Express

• Moynihan Train Hall & Penn Station renovation and expansion

• East side access & Penn Access1

Housing:

• Passage of the City of Yes bills

• Voter approval of the 2025 Charter Revision Commission housing ballot proposals

• Mayor Mamdani’s Block by Block Housing Plan

• Inclusion and passage of SEQRA (State Environmental Quality Review Act) reform in the New York State FY27 budget

The political will to build is clearly there. The constraint is no longer whether NYC wants to build, but whether it can build fast and cheap enough to make a real difference.

On the housing front, recent legislative wins have not yet translated to significant growth in new units, though the rate of new housing development has picked up. The number of potential new units allowed by just the 2024 City of Yes rezonings (~82,000 new units) is more than the additional housing added by all previous rezonings over the past two decades (~70,000 new units).

Yet much, much more building will be needed, not only for housing but for New York’s transportation, energy infrastructure, and streets.

The amount of new housing in development is still not nearly as much as was built by NYC in previous decades or enough to meet projected population demands. Important questions about where public funds should go to best support transit – free buses or more subway extensions – remain hotly debated. While pro-building, pro-growth politicians are finally pushing policies in the necessary direction, much more will be needed to dig the city out of the infrastructure hole it ended up in from decades of underinvestment.

Let’s take a look at upcoming opportunities New York has to tackle these intertwined fronts of the affordability crisis, what it could be doing better, and how recent policy developments have unlocked growth.

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More Rezonings and Development Around Transit

Mayor Mamdani recently released the Block by Block: The Housing Plan for A New Era, which covers many strategies to make NYC more affordable. The plan lays out a vision for 200,000 new housing units and preserving another 200,000 existing units over the next decade.

While the strategies involve everything from improved tenant protections to community land trust investment, a particularly exciting element is enabling transit-oriented development (TOD). TOD is a building block for providing accessibility for all New Yorkers, maximizing the benefit of new housing by placing it right next to transportation nodes. Optimizing the placement of new units by coordinating them around transit hubs also serves as a double win for affordability.

Thanks to the passage of City of Yes, the largest update to the zoning resolution since the 1960s, there is now greater opportunity for adding density around transit stations. Paired with the Affordable Housing Fast Track created by the 2025 CRC proposals, new housing can be built faster and in the places that best connect residents to jobs and opportunities.

Many other currently transit-rich communities have been stymied from growing by outdated zoning regulations that remain in place. One prime candidate is the area south of Prospect Park, for which the Mamdani administration recently announced rezoning plans along portions of McDonald Avenue and Coney Island Avenue. Both these streets have great transit access, with the F, G, B, and Q lines nearby, but need to be freed from outdated zoning regulations to actually create new housing in the area.

While these are the first neighborhoods to be targeted for upzoning by the current Mayor, they certainly cannot be the last. The Mayor should look at further options on where to add TOD, especially in parts of the city where growth is forecasted to happen at the greatest rate.2 Adding housing in these neighborhoods will go the furthest in addressing affordability. One upcoming candidate is the corridor of neighborhoods that will receive new transit access from the IBX (see more below).

Electeds representing neighborhoods that are prime candidates for rezoning should also keep in mind that they can’t shift all societal needs purely onto housing developments. Too many asks result in housing becoming unaffordable to build and drastically elongated timelines. With each proposed housing development, there needs to be discussion of what the housing can solve and what needs to be addressed by other means.

These discussions can and should include residents, community boards, Councilmembers, and citywide officials. But such involved parties would do well to remember that voters spoke overwhelmingly in the last election that they want more housing. While there are challenges with determining where and how to build the new housing, there are also challenges due to delays and inaction. Costs go up, further maintenance is needed for older housing stock, public sentiment shifts against the government, and lost trust further blocks the ability to act.

The MTA needs to build faster and cheaper

It is no secret that New York’s transit capital construction costs are among the highest in the world. Cost per mile of new track, for one oft-cited metric, is wildly higher than other major cities. Tackling these costs and finding ways to make transit funds go further will be key to expanding the MTA’s portfolio.

Streamlined state environmental review, passed in the FY27 State budget, can be a massive opportunity for the MTA. The reduced timelines created by SEQRA (State Environmental Quality Review Act) reform can take months, if not years, off development timelines and reduce uncertainty in approvals, further lowering costs. One immediate application is speeding up the tunneling for the Second Avenue subway extension. When timelines are shortened and costs go down across the board, the scope of transit projects can be increased and more projects can be pursued.

Being clear about scope upfront through capital planning is another money-saving tool the MTA has yielded well in recent years. One example is switching station elevators from stopping in a mezzanine level to having the go direct to the platforms. This one small change that was planned ahead of station construction has saved the MTA hundreds of millions. Planning ahead reduces costs and identifies areas for innovation.

Of course, the unpredictability of funding increases costs. Recent transit projects in the region have unfortunately dealt with not even receiving funds that are obligated to them. The hope is that future funding decisions will become less arbitrary and more consistent. On some levels, this is not up to the city, state, or MTA. But in other cases there are opportunities for local actors to do more.

For example, the predictability of zoning in new areas following City of Yes is an opportunity to cross-subsidize transit developments in those neighborhoods. Developers know they will be able to build in these areas and can unlock financing. Continued rezonings and new transit projects will increase land values and provide opportunities for new financing.

New Funding Sources to Unlock Capital

The MTA relies more on public funds for both maintenance and expansion projects than many other major transit authorities, and that funding has not been consistent historically. TfL (London’s transportation governing body), for one example, is much more fare box supported than the MTA. As a result, TfL can better finance its state of good repair through fares, and then use government funding to pay for capital projects.

One encouraging sign here has been the re-authorization of land value tax around new transit. Land value tax is a great source of funding, as is value capture by public agencies. Publicly acquiring property, sitting on it while increasing the value of the land, and then disposing of it afterwards for a profit has been a key strategy for the MTA. One example is at 125th St/Park and 125th St/Lexington: the MTA acquired these lots, got them rezoned, and will be able to sell these properties once the Second Avenue expansion is complete.

This will bring in tremendous value, but it is not enough.

People speculate where they foresee new transit, and those who get in early capture much of the benefit. To combat this, the State can go even further than land value tax authorizations, such as with automatic upzoning around new transit and automatic land value capture when new transit uplifts values.

A Perfect Opportunity to Deliver Affordability: The Interborough Express

Transit improvements and expansions must be talked about incessantly, decade after decade, to bring them to fruition. Ideas that seemed fantasies decades ago are becoming reality today, but only through persistence and moving toward their acceptance.

A shining example of this is the Interborough Express (IBX). The IBX began as an idea proposed by the Regional Plan Association (RPA) in 1996. Only in 2022 did Governor Hochul provide key support to move the IBX forward, and it is now in its environmental study phase.

The IBX will add 14-miles of above-ground track with new stations, connections to 17 subway lines, the LIRR, and buses in Brooklyn and Queens. The connections and accessibility improvements will bring new transit, housing, economic development to many Brooklyn and Queens communities.

Excitingly, many of the planned and proposed transit projects in the MTA’s portfolio are using existing right-of-way and legacy tunneling, strategies that will reduce both timeline and overall costs to deliver new transit options relatively fast and cheap for the city. Pursuing such strategies in coordination with the advanced planning and value capture tools listed above could result in returns to the MTA and public funds many times what it costs to build.

In line with this, it is encouraging to see that the MTA is being very conscious about where to place stations, collaborating with the NYC DOT on design and urban planning around the stations. More recent versions of the IBX plan have removed unnecessary stations, bringing down expected costs without affecting the expected 160,000 daily ridership estimated.

The MTA, the City, and the State must continue to coordinate transit investment with investment in the streets around transit as well. This means looking at affected neighborhoods for potential upzoning and coordinating transit improvements with other infrastructure upgrades. The end goal of any transportation project is creating vibrant places that people want to be and creating new housing and jobs. Transportation is the greatest facilitator of that, and no opportunity on this scale should be wasted by lack of ambition.

Conclusion

The affordability crisis that has increasingly restricted New York’s growth and become its defining problem in the 21st century is finally being taken seriously by elected and appointed leaders. Pro-building policies have not just been empty words and promises on the campaign trail. Nor are they original to the current politicians in charge.

Determined efforts by elected officials and by leaders at agencies including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) over the past several administrations have unlocked housing and transportation opportunities across the City.

More will be needed not only to bring NYC’s transportation and housing infrastructure up to modern times but also to prepare it for continued growth and success in the future.

For the many different transportation and housing projects of recent years to truly effect change, they will need to come together in a comprehensive system. For improving transit, this means looking at not just single street redesigns or individual station improvements, but constructing connected networks of redesigned streets and transit options. Low Traffic Neighborhoods and the strategies listed in the Transit Priority Atlas provide two lenses for how to successfully reconfigure streets.

With housing, rezonings and new developments need to occur citywide. Isolated upzonings or individual housing projects cannot solve the affordability crisis. Only through comprehensive zoning changes and the construction of a variety of housing types can rent and home prices be brought into check.

Options for reducing building costs in New York are numerous and must be further explored. Property tax reform would reduce costs for many residents today, while permitting reform would further speed up development timelines, bringing costs down in the future. Common sense reform of the building code, like expanding single-stair allowance and reducing elevator minimums would further expand housing supply and reduce development costs.

And lastly, without consideration of the labor market and incentivizing mid- and high-paying jobs to be created and based in New York, the entire affordability program falls apart. For NYC to continue to grow, it needs a dynamic economy that provides opportunities across industries and occupations.

Fortunately, providing more housing and transit options will better connect people to job opportunities. Elected officials and city agencies must be proud of transit expansions and new housing developments. New stations and transit access create jobs and huge amounts of value. A new station can give a neighborhood new life. New housing, new transit, and new jobs all enable each other in a virtuous cycle.

May we be at the very start of this cycle and do what we can to keep pushing the ball forward.

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I wanted to share that I have a piece out with Vital City today on a topic that I and many others have been banging the drum on: NYC’s stagnant job creation and the growing issues with where the new jobs are coming from.

Since I first wrote about the danger of this limited and concentrated job growth, there has been growing attention and worry, but still little action. At a recent City Council hearing, Council leader Julie Menin asked where the Mayor’s job plan is and what the strategy is to fuel job creation. At the same time, Mayor Mamdani has yet to name a CEO for the Economic Development Corporation (EDC), which is a key engine of economic growth the City should utilize.

Mayor Mamdani ran on an affordability platform and has shown he cares deeply about addressing NYC’s affordability crisis through plans on housing and transit. The third leg of this affordability stool that must be tackled is jobs. Creating high-paying jobs based in New York will be necessary to truly mitigate the affordability crisis, while also helping to shore up chronic city budget gaps moving forward.

Please check out my article in Vital City on why where new jobs are being created matters and strategies the Mamdani administration can pursue to revive high-paying job growth in NYC.

And look out for more to come on this topic soon!

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TL;DR:

The State Capacity Ecosystem Hub is live.

• Search (in Beta) curates a personalized view of who’s working on your specific areas of interest

• Directory lists >300 orgs focused on government effectiveness and what they’re working on

• Connect lets you add what you’re working on, seek and share opportunities, and find collaborators

• Affinity helps you find surprise relationships between organizations, so you know who to work with

Two key things to do right now:

• Submit yourself to Connect — tell us what you’re working on and what you need; we’ll curate a living database of challenges, funding opportunities, and practitioner partners

• Sign up for our first event, a CivicTech AI Hackathon — June 24, 5:30- 9 p.m.

Why we’re building the Ecosystem

Good policy fails because the practitioners, technologists, researchers, and funders working to fix government are operating in silos, without a clear view of each other and with few collaboration pathways. Great talent is left out of the conversation, not by intent, but because it simply cannot find its way in.

We believe visibility is infrastructure. A clear map of who is doing what is the first step toward State Capacity acting like an ecosystem and not just a collection of isolated players.

Our goal is to help create that well-functioning ecosystem: one where every participant knows what the others are doing, sees them as collaborators rather than competitors, and can access shared knowledge and resources when they need them. Great theory gets operationalized. Hard-won practitioner knowledge travels. Capital flows toward the gaps, not just the familiar names.

Overview of the Tools

Search (Beta), located on the Hub, returns results relevant to you based on a mad libs-style interface that allows you to select your role, what you’re seeking, a problem area, and a geography. This feature can only show what currently exists, and will improve as we add more organizations and individual connections.

Directory offers you a view of all the organizations in the Ecosystem. Use it to understand who is working on what. Filter based on segment, problem statements, geographic focus, and more. It offers a more holistic view than Search’s curation.

Connect is the layer we’re most excited about. Find real people and organizations working on problems you care about. More importantly, submit what you’re working on so that others can find you. Together, we’ll curate a living, breathing picture of who’s working on what in the Ecosystem.

Affinity helps you find surprising relationships between organizations based on shared problem areas, overlapping funding sources, and description similarity. Use that knowledge to re-envision who you can work with and on what.

About the event

On June 24, we’re hosting a one-evening hackathon for civic technologists, government practitioners, students, and anyone else who wants to build tools that help strengthen our government’s ability to deliver.

The goal is connection, not perfection. Find collaborators interested in the same topics. Build quick, working prototypes that take ideas from -1 to 0 and show whether an idea is worth pursuing. See if someone in attendance can help connect you to the right folks to turn that idea into something real.

Check out the event page for more information.

How you can help

When we delivered the first version of the Ecosystem, we effectively shared a list of orgs, and an incomplete one at that. Folks appreciated the clarity it brought to who is working on State Capacity, but there was no way to act on that clarity. Dozens of follow-on conversations informed how to make our map more useful: living problem statements, the ability to find collaborators, and hosting live events move us from theory to action.

Chances are this version of the Ecosystem isn’t perfect either. You can keep helping us improve it. Add your organization and your problem statement. Join our events and host your own. Reach out with feedback.

Our hope is that our work echoes the lessons of State Capacity: agile delivery, test and learn methodologies, shared evidence, scalable results.

The closing message

Delivering State Capacity may be hard, but the roadblocks aren’t mysterious: they’re structural. Knowledge doesn’t travel because there’s no infrastructure for it to travel on. Capital concentrates because funders fund what they can see. Practitioners work in isolation because isolation is the default.

This is why we’ve built the Ecosystem, but it is only as helpful as the community behind it. And there are a million other ways folks can build out the infrastructure further in their own ways.

The State Capacity Ecosystem already exists. It just needs to act like one. Let’s build it together.

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Any opinions expressed below are solely my own and do not represent the views of Manhattan Community Board 3.

Find your community district and key information about it here.

Manhattan Community Board 3 May 2026 Full Board Meeting

Tuesday, May 26, 2026 - 6:30pm

PS 20 - 166 Essex Street

Meeting Highlights:

• Kimlau Square arch: MCB3 passed a resolution supporting the relocation of the Kimlau Square Memorial Arch as part of the square’s redesign, with some debate over whether there had been adequate public engagement

• Canal Street redesign delayed: DOT extended the timeline on the Canal Street redesign and will not take the scheduled vote in June. No new target date was announced.

• Delivery worker e-bike storage: One app company has expressed interest in funding indoor bike storage for delivery workers on E 11th Street

• St. Mark’s bike lane: MCB3 passed a resolution supporting a new protected bike lane on St. Mark’s Place between 3rd Avenue and Avenue A

Notes from board meeting:

Public Session

• Middlechurch shared their plans for the empty lot at 112 2nd Avenue

  • creating a new community space with an event stage, green space, historic facade elements retained

• On 6/3 6 PM there will be a candidates’ forum for the upcoming primary elections

  • will feature a discussion between all State-level candidates running in the Community District 3 area

• Another candidate forum this Friday focused on candidates running to represent the area between Montgomery St and the Battery, from Congress to State Assembly

  

• Spring Awakening Festival is happening this Saturday 12-4 PM, on Avenue B open street

  • there will be a parade, dancing, music, children’s pony rides, and more!

• On Wednesday, 6/10 there will be the annual Village Awards, which honors longstanding community leaders/institutions

• Opposition from community members to the redesign of Kimlau Square and moving the arch

• Voting for the People’s Money, citywide participatory budgeting, is currently underway

  • anyone 11+ years old and living in NYC is eligible to vote

• Civic Engagement Commission representative shared new initiative with National Civic League to improve how public meetings are run

  • beginning with studying one board in every borough, the start of a year-long study process

  • expecting the first report to come out in July based on surveys of community board members

Elected Officials Reports

• Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal’s Liaison

  • BP is dedicating his entire capital budget to arts and culture, calling it the Manhattan Multiplier for Arts and Culture

  • opening a welcome center in the northern Manhattan office

  • offering discretionary grants of up to $20k to nonprofits operating in Manhattan

  • Manhattan community board applications are done, list of appointments has been finalized, will be announced by the end of the week

• Congressmember Dan Goldman’s Liaison

  • Introduced the After School For All Act that will create universal after-school programs, to be funded by 1% increase to corporate income tax

  • Introduced legislation to ban surveillance pricing on food apps

• Assemblymember Grace Lee’s Liaison

  • Many bills progressing through the Assembly

• Assemblymember Keith Powers’ Liaison

  • Introduced bill to prevent incidents of drink spiking happening across NYC

• State Senator Brian Kavanagh’s Liaison

  • hosting two mobile office hours next month — on 6/10 6 PM and on 6/24 9 AM-12 PM

    • providing assistance with getting in touch with City or State agencies

  • Introduced legislation to create a new criminal charge for intentional and repeated tenant harassment, Class E felony with a maximum of 7 years in prison

• Councilmember Harvey Epstein - attended

  • Mayor released the City Executive Budget last week, Council budget hearings will occur over the next three weeks

    • deadline for an enacted budget is June 30th

    • public testimony for the budget is on June 10th - attend and speak about what you want to see more or less funding for in the budget!

  • Juneteenth event on 6/18, 4th Street between Broadway and Lafayette

  • Speaker came out in support of year-round outdoor dining, Councilmembers are working to add language to a curbs bill pushing this

    • read more on issues with the current outdoor dining system here

Board Reports

• District Manager’s Report

  • Executive budget includes responses to MCB3 capital and expense requests

  • DOT has extended timeline on the Canal Street redesign, will not take scheduled vote for June

  • Update on delivery worker bikes on E 11th St: one app company has expressed interest in providing money to find indoor storage

    • jurisdiction has been moved to the Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice, MCB3 is awaiting a response from this office

  • New members who will be appointed to MCB3 are requested to attend all the committee meetings in June, and then determine what are their top choices to apply to sit on in July

Committee Reports

See Committee Meeting recordings here!

• Transportation, Public Safety, & Environment

  • Resolution in support of a bike lane being added on St. Mark’s between 3rd Ave and Avenue A

  • Resolution in support of co-naming the corner of Rivington St between Stanton and Eldridge as Dolores “Brownie” Morales

  • Resolution in support of moving the Kimlau Square Memorial Arch as part of the Kimlau Square redesign

    • MCB3 members had debate over whether there was truly enough public engagement about the plan to move the arch, and whether there was even still time for MCB3 to hold more meetings about it prior to the Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing

    • motion to send the resolution back to committee did not pass

    • CORRECTION 6/2/26: CB3’s resolution supported the necessity of the project team's application to LPC to move the memorial arch as part of the redesign, NOT in support of moving the memorial arch. The Board has not yet taken a position on the redesign itself, but this resolution supports allowing the project to proceed in receiving feedback from LPC in their review.

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The following is an excerpt from my latest post in The Bigger Apple. To read the full piece, check out the article here and subscribe to The Bigger Apple for more insightful NYC policy analysis!

The Bigger Apple

NYC Keeps Passing Laws It Can’t Afford

As a member of my community board, I have the pleasure of attending monthly full board meetings. At these meetings, local representatives or their liaisons from City Council members to State legislators provide whatever updates they so wi…

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4 months ago · 8 likes · Tal Roded

As a member of my community board, I have the pleasure of attending monthly full board meetings. At these meetings, local representatives or their liaisons from City Council members to State legislators provide whatever updates they so wish, typically on legislation the elected has introduced, been working on, or recently had passed.

Initially, I was greatly impressed by the parade of bills and resolutions being touted. As the procession repeated itself with each passing meeting, however, I began to wonder why all our City’s problems weren’t fixed yet, given the impressive volume of legislation being passed in the City, State, and federal chambers.

As I began having conversations with workers at city agencies, and political advocates doing on-the-ground work, a more complete picture of these policies emerged.

While agencies often supported the policies being passed, they were frequently exasperated with the burden of new work being piled on without the requisite support of new funding and staffing. Very often, the bills being passed by our proactive and energetic legislators do not adequately consider the means or mechanisms for implementation. These unfunded mandates ultimately undermine public trust in government effectiveness when the law says one thing but the government is unable to enact or enforce it.

City Council Fiscal Impact Statements

Since the passage of the current New York City Charter in 1989, which abolished the Board of Estimate and massively expanded the City Council’s role in NYC governance, some version of fiscal impact statements have been required to vote on proposed legislation.

Chapter 2, Section 33 of the New York City Charter outlines the nature of and requirements regarding fiscal impact statements (FIS). Among these requirements are that all proposed local laws and budget modifications must be accompanied by estimates of “the fiscal impact of the law or modification on the revenues and expenditures of the city”. Such costs and revenues must be estimated for the fiscal year the legislation would become effective, the following fiscal year, and the fiscal year in which the “full impact” of the legislation is expected to occur.

Regarding the accuracy of these estimates, however, the Charter is much more forgiving: “If the estimate contained in a FIS is inaccurate, such inaccuracy does not invalidate the local law or budget modification”. Critically, appropriating the money to fund the expenditures outlined in the FIS is also not required. While the costs of new legislation must be listed out by the City Council, they can then thereafter be ignored by the Council. An FIS can acknowledge that a proposed local law would add massive expenditures to the budget while no funding or revenue sources for the legislation is specified.

So while fiscal impact statements are not comprehensive in delineating the potential impacts of a new local law, nor do they even have to be accurate, they still provide a starting point for measuring the costs of new legislation. In the case of proposed local laws, the required involvement of the Office of Management and Budget also, in theory, brings some rigor and emphasis to accuracy in the estimates.

Introducing the City Council Fiscal Impacts Tracker

These FIS are provided in unstructured Word document attachments on Legistar (link), so in order to better understand the totality of potential costs of mandates and legislation being passed by the NY City Council (NYCC), I aggregated all the fiscal impact statements since 2014 into the NYC Council Fiscal Impacts Tracker.1

The tracker parses available FIS (see footnote) to break them down into the estimated revenue, expenses (operational and capital), and net fiscal impact of the associated local law.

Of the 1,563 fiscal impact statements in the Legistar API for Jan 2014- Apr 2026, 219 were added to the table. The FIS not added to the table were either because both revenue and expense impacts were zero (1,108 cases), no revenue or expense impacts could be found/extracted by Claude (183 cases), or there were duplicates with proposed bills and enacted local laws (~90 cases).

What the data tells us about new costs

Even with the limitations to what data could be scraped, the database contains over $7.5 billion in net fiscal impact (operational expenses + capital expenses - revenues) for City agencies introduced by Council legislation between 2014 and 2026. That represents a fiscal burden larger than the total FY25 budgets for some of the largest agencies, like the departments of housing (HPD), police (NYPD), sanitation (DSNY) and transportation (DOT).

To read the rest of this article, diving into the mostly costly local laws over time and suggesting solutions for proposed legislation cost control, head over to The Bigger Apple:

The Bigger Apple

NYC Keeps Passing Laws It Can’t Afford

As a member of my community board, I have the pleasure of attending monthly full board meetings. At these meetings, local representatives or their liaisons from City Council members to State legislators provide whatever updates they so wi…

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4 months ago · 8 likes · Tal Roded

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Author’s note #2: Recently, the BRC Senior Services Center received a camera upgrade, so Parks Committee Meetings are now hybrid—you can join via Zoom! Here’s a YouTube upload of this meeting:

Parks Manager Updates

Eddie, the Parks Manager, provided updates on:

• Upcoming Events: “It’s My Park” volunteer events at Corlears Hook (May 8) and Tompkins Square Park (May 9).

• Park Safety & Maintenance: Discussions on ongoing collaborations with the 5th Precinct to address drug use and syringe removal in Sara D. Roosevelt (SDR) Park.

  • Parks works with the Department of Sanitation to clean up syringes. For example, they found 114 last week.

  • A new syringe disposal unit will be added near Hester Street.

• Illegal Dumping: Parks has successfully enforced penalties for trash dumping at Captain Jacob Joseph Playground. (This topic was previously discussed at the January and March committee meetings)

• Water Access: Confirmation that water fountain turn-ons are underway following a harsh winter.

Questions for the Parks Manager

• Q: Recently at SDR Park, an elderly lady was nearly raped. The suspect was arrested that day, but what is being done to prevent this from happening again?

  • A: NYPD has now established a patrol in the park, which includes a night patrol from 6:00 PM to midnight.

• Q: There have been reports of someone camping out at East River Park. Has Parks responded yet?

  • A: We haven’t received any reports about this. 311 should respond within a couple of hours if you file a report.

• Q: Are there any updates on replacing the Hester Street Playground sandbox? We wrote a resolution about it [in March 2025] and discussed a nature-based replacement. Last I heard [NY Parks Manhattan Chief of Staff] Steve Simon was requesting further information.

  • A: I’ll follow up. There have been conversations about adding more sand to the sandbox.

  • A: (Community Board District Manager) The applicants for the sandbox replacement walked away from the project. The reasons for this remain unclear.

• Q: Closing down the Men’s Shelter on East 30th will put more pressure on SDR Park. Are we ready for that?

• Q: At Columbus Park, someone is setting the pavilion on fire. It has happened twice in the last six months. Is someone looking into this?

Lower East Side Ecology Center (LESEC) Spring Programming

Maddie discussed spring programming, including:

• LESEC is running its Coolest Block in the Lower East Side contest again this year. Last year had 13 participants.

• Last year’s contest winners have had their tree guards installed via a partnership with NYC Parks Tree Time.

• When caring for street trees, you can borrow tools from the Tool Lending Library. The library stocks gloves, visibility vests, and other supplies.

  • To use the service, first become a member online. You can then pick up tools at the Tompkins Square Park Greenmarket on Sundays between 9AM and 4PM.

Department of Design and Construction (DDC): Construction of Restroom in East River Park

• The project is a design-build contract for a 760 square feet restroom facility at East River Park, parallel to Grand Street nearby East River Park Field (the ballpark).

• Construction is expected to start soon, with completion slated for the fall.

Questions for the DDC about the restrooms

• Q: What is Design-Build?

  • A: It is a kind of contract where the same firm does the design and building. In other contracts, different firms may each complete each phase separately.

• Q: This construction won’t affect already-awarded ballpark permits, right?

  • A: Correct.

• Q: Will this impact access to the pedestrian bridges into East River Park?

  • A: No, it will not affect pedestrian bridge access.

• Q: Is there utility work involved in this project?

  • A: Yes, there will be underground utility work. We have already coordinated with ConEdison on this.

• Q: Is ConEdison feeling good about the schedule? The seem to still be busy recovering from the winter.

  • A: Yes, it’s fine, we coordinated with them via the East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) project.

• Q: Will you put air monitors where construction is occurring? That is one of the busiest parts of the park.

  • A: There will be a construction fence to prevent debris from affecting visitors. Because this project only involves digging up a grass lawn (clean fill that has already been raised) to a depth of 4 feet, air monitoring is not required. Containment is generally only used for lead paint or asbestos. However, we are working with the ESCR team and can coordinate to water down the area if we see dust.

• Q: What if the public sees any issues with the construction?

  • A: There will not be a dedicated Community Construction Liaison (CCL) for this specific site as there is for ESCR. However, the ESCR online inquiry tool can be used as a resource.

• Q: Why weren’t these restrooms completed during the main ESCR construction in the area?

  • A: This was a separate contract. The design and permitting for the restrooms occurred well after the start of ESCR construction. While there are currently bathrooms in the Fireboat House, they won’t be available as a long-term solution.

• Q: Under an agreement with the community, DDC pledged to keep at least 42% of the park open at all times. Does this construction violate that pledge?

  • A: We can relay that question to the ESCR team

• Q: How are you protecting the nearby trees?

  • A: We are surrounding those trees with 4x4 wooden cages for protection.

NY Parks responses to CB budget requests

• The Community Board (CB) makes budget requests to the city government, which are approved in October. In January, the City creates a preliminary budget, and the City Council hosts executive budget hearings in May.

• The CB now has responses to last year’s budget requests.

• Most responses from the Parks Department state that they lack the funding for specific requests, as they do not have their own capital funding. Typically, these projects must be funded by the City or specific elected officials.

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Some notable examples:

• of Maximum New York has built out an entire data hub exploring new ways to visualize and understand government, and highlighted other uses here

• of Vital City has launched dozens of apps like NYPD CompStat ledger that organizes and visualizes NYC crime data in real-time

  • With tons more great NYC-focused AI apps on the Vital City portal here

• Nathan Storey of NYC OTI has built Civic AI Tools to make working with NYC Open Data easier and more effective

• Sean Eke of CBC created Hearing Hearings, which summarizes NY City Council hearings from YouTube transcripts & NY City Council Legistar information

While AI tools still have many limitations and should be used with guardrails, with their outputs always checked and verified, ignoring them only limits one’s own potential today.1

In this post, I want to showcase several ways I have used AI tools to contribute to the civic technology domain myself. I will cover how I use AI to enhance and inform my Substack writing, to conduct policy research and understand government systems better, and to build tools for the public like with Block Party.2

If you have an AI use case or civic tech tool you have created, please share it with me! I will add it to the AI Civic Tech Tools Wiki on my website, and feature it in future posts. If you want to learn more about how to use/build these tools, or connect with others building in this space, please also reach out to me to connect or simply to register your interest. I am in the works with several other civic tech builders to plan some events and establish a working group for AI/policy — look out for more to come soon.

AI for Substack Writing and Open Data Exploration

Perhaps the most direct impact of AI on my own work has been its complete integration into my data exploration and visuals-making process. Previously, when digging into the data behind a policy topic, I would manually comb through dozens of online pages, spend hours tracking down data sources, and even longer on putting together tables or charts that could shed insights on the issues I was writing on.

Today, I let AI do much of this tracking down and visual creation. That is not to say I don’t still spend much time googling and reading about various data sets and contexts. But I will ask Claude to help me find relevant sources, or provide it with several sources I have found and ask it to find me others that are similar or provide different perspectives. This has both sped up my research process and deepened it by surfacing links that I would not have found otherwise.

Similarly, once I have a good idea of a visual I want to produce based on my findings and the message I want to convey, I’ll ask Claude to put it together. I may suggest an exact chart type and details I want it to use, or I’ll just give Claude a description of what I want and iterate on whatever it comes up with.

Here are several examples of the visuals I’ve created for Substack posts:

• Table of NYC Chief Savings Officers budget savings items, scraped from a Mayor’s Office announcement text list

• Loading bar breakdown of NYC curb space allocation across the entire city

• Visualization of various tax rates in NYC

• Treemap of the NYC FY2025 budget, broken down by agency and color-coded by domain

One huge upgrade to my chart-making thanks to AI has been the ability to make these visuals interactive. While I was previously making static charts in R (ggplot2) or tables with Datawrapper that had minimal interactivity, web-hosted visuals made by Claude have much more dynamic elements. For any visual I create, I can ask Claude to make it sortable, filterable, shift what element the visual is highlighting or sizing by, or completely recalculate the chart based on a user selection.

Some tips to improve the visual-making process:

• Set up a skill, or at least a markdown document accessible to Claude, with instructions on how you like your charts to look and preferred chart types or methodologies for certain types of data. This can also work in the negative, like instructing Claude to never create pie charts for budget data (or whatever else you would like).

• Create a visualization style guide that matches your personal preferred style from everything like color schemes to fonts to how legends or footnotes should be formatted. Anytime Claude keeps formatting visuals in a way you don’t like, add new instructions to this guide so it avoids doing so in the future.

• Tell Claude to provide all sources used in its visual and explain all methodology for any calculations or transformations done.

• Ask Claude to make charts interactive if possible, including image download/embed links and links to download/view the data source.

On that last point, if you want to enable AI to do the same for you, you’ll have to set-up a pipeline so Claude has somewhere to host your data, charts, and methodology pages. Otherwise all these files can only be locally hosted and you won’t have a way to make these visuals/datasets publicly accessible or easily shareable.

My set-up has involved linking Claude Code to my personal Github, setting up rules for which repos or folders it should push new code for new posts/visuals to, and then pushing new visuals and anything hosted on the web to their own GitHub Page. Once you’ve got that type of workflow set, you can have Claude directly push new pages or make changes to existing pages that will nearly instantly update on a live, publicly accessible webpage. You can even use Github Actions to automate regular updates or data pushes, along with much more.

Tips for hosting AI-created visuals on custom webpages:

• The first step is to set up the GitHub CLI for Claude Code (or whatever model you are running on your computer) – ask Claude to walk you through how to do this!

• Ask Claude to create a website and store it locally, telling it what data to use, such as an open dataset name or whatever local files you have. You can also then make edits locally, before pushing changes to GitHub to update your website/pages.

• Use Namecheap or another domain hosting service to create a new CNAME record (DNS settings) that points to your newly created GitHub website/page.

• Anytime you make a change to one of your website pages, can always ask Claude to launch a local server to show you the updates; after reviewing changes on the localhost page, tell Claude to push those changes and that’s all you should need to do for updates to go live!

For extra credit, you can purchase your own domain and create custom subdomains with whatever names you wish. I use Namecheap to do this but there are many cheap options. You can then link your GitHub Pages to these customized domain names, so that your AI-created webpages have fun or clean names like:

nycuriosity.com | data.nycuriosity.com | talroded.nycuriosity.com

I realize that not all the above steps are intuitive for those without prior GitHub or website development experience. If you are interested in setting up your own websites, data portals, interactive charts, or any of the above, feel free to reach out to me! And remember that Claude itself can be an instrumental partner in setting up these work processes to begin with.

Building the Block Party Community Board Resolutions Knowledge Base

I recently wrote about a new tool I partnered with the Block Party team to build, the NYC Community Boards resolutions knowledge base. You can read more about what this tool is and how it can help inform users about community board discussions and actions here.

The process to construct this resolutions database currently involves fetching the meeting notes PDF from its URL, extracting all the raw text, then using a number of rules to identify the relevant resolution text and parse it out from the full PDF. The text is then lightly cleaned and stored in different context chunks related to whether the resolution text is the title, a whereas clause (which gives background on the resolution topic), or a therefore clause (which states the action/decision the CB is making with the resolution).

To build this resolutions extractor, I conducted an iterative approach with Claude Code writing the majority of the Python code in every step. In many instances, I spoke to Claude in plain-language, describing to it what I wanted to do (“create an automatic pdf extractor that downloads every meeting notes available on the Manhattan CB3 website”) and then reviewing its code. I was then able to give Claude feedback on the pipeline it set-up, and iterate to improve how text was extracted or chunked, again all as if I was talking to a colleague.

My collaborator on this work, Sarah Sachs, also used AI to help us generate AI summaries of resolutions. In her case, she took the text chunks I uploaded and ran them through an OpenAI model called in a Python script, with a simple prompt asking the model to summarize each text chunk for each resolution. This prompt is by no means perfect or in a final state for our own purposes, but it’s incredible how effective the model was at providing concise and informative summaries based on such simple plain instructions.

Explore the Community Board resolutions and transcripts databases here.

The result is a centralized, searchable database of community board resolutions that returns both the full resolution text and 2-3 sentence summaries that convey the main takeaways. Community Board members, the public, journalists, and any other interested party can stay better informed on the decisions being made by Community Boards or search for the full history of CB resolutions on any topic or keyword.

The most exciting part is that our work on Block Party has just begun, and we are currently working on scaling up the tool. Again using AI to enable our workflow, we are scaling the resolutions knowledge base to include all Community Boards posting their meeting notes or resolutions publicly, and adding new features to enable exploring and understanding the text better.

AI tools made it possible to create the first ever database of this kind for NYC Community Boards that can improve democratic participation and awareness of local issues, built by a small team in just a few months.

AI is transforming the civic technology field. Let’s transform it together.

Key to all the AI use cases in this post are two things:

1. I always check Claude’s work for any visual it creates and any data it presents. This includes making sure calculations are performed correctly, data sources exist and are being accessed and manipulated properly, and that claimed figures match up with reality (where possible to verify) or expectations (where not).3

2. I never use Claude to generate my opinions or do my writing. While I find it an amazing researcher and visual-maker, I personally do not want to automate the actual analysis and synthesis of the data insights process. You may hold different views, but this is the part I find most essential to keep guarded from automation.

The examples shared above are also just two narrow slices of the multitude of applications for the suite of AI tools currently out there. They are by no means the only use cases for AI, nor even close to the frontier of what current models and tools can accomplish.

To give just a few more examples:

• I created a “NYC Government Bodies Explorer” that lets you organize and visualize the size of NYC agencies, commissions, and other types of government bodies by headcount or budget. This was all built on publicly available data that Claude Code scraped.

• For that matter, the Data Hub itself that I host these visuals and all the charts and tables for my Substack posts was built and is constantly updated by Claude.

• My personal website is also built using Claude, which further auto-updates my Writings tab when I make new posts and builds the Wiki page with all its resources based on a pile of links I continue to throw at it without structure.

• Henry Grunzweig created the State Capacity Ecosystem map that makes it simple to find organizations working on state capacity problems. I created an interactive version of this map, using AI to build it, here.

I highly encourage anyone interested in covering public policy or having a meaningful impact on policies to experiment with AI and learn how to use and build tools themselves. As I mentioned above, if you wish to share a use case or tool of your own, please share it with me (by Substack DM, in the comments of this post, email, or anywhere else) and I will both add it to my AI Civic Tech Tools wiki and feature it in a future Substack post.

Further, I’m planning some events with other civic tech practitioners to grow the state capacity and civic tech ecosystem in NYC. Look out for announcements soon on hackathon-style events and mixers where people with policy interests can come together to build and explore these tools. And if you’re interested in getting involved, please reach out to one of us.

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Any opinions expressed below are solely my own and do not represent the views of Manhattan Community Board 3.

Find your community district and key information about it here.

Manhattan Community Board 3 Apr 2026 Full Board Meeting

Tuesday, Apr 28, 2026 - 6:30pm

PS 20 - 166 Essex Street

Meeting Highlights:

• The E 11th St delivery worker bike corral once again came up in the public session, with residents saying sidewalks are impassable and that nearby storefronts are closed or unable to pay rent because of the activity. The Board Chair confirmed that the Mayor’s new Office of Mass Engagement has stepped in to work with all parties on a resolution.

• The Land Use Committee approved a Certificate of Appropriateness for St. Augustine’s Church to build a 21-story development at 290 Henry Street with 130 income-restricted units, retail, and religious space — requiring a Zoning Special Permit because the zoning lot contains a landmark.

• The Transportation Committee resolved to support all NYCDOT Open Streets in CD3, including 5-day operations on Canal Street from 3–10 PM.

• NY City Council Speaker Menin announced she will advance Councilmember Martre’s No More 24 bill, ending a hunger strike by 15 home care aide workers that began last week in support of the legislation.

• NYCDOT is siting e-bike battery storage cabinets across the city this summer to cut down on lithium battery fires, and is accepting public suggestions for locations through July 31st.

Notes from board meeting:

Public Session

• Public comments about the delivery workers bike corral on E 11th St

  • one resident: situation has become desire, no space to move on the sidewalks, retail stores cannot stay in business

  • another resident: all storefronts on the street are currently closed or are unable to pay their rents due to the current situation

• Lower East Side Preservation Initiative recently won a landmarking for a church in the LES

  • hosting an opening ceremony this Saturday, 5/2 2-5 PM for a photography exhibit at The Clemente

    • exhibit will be running until June 30th

• Organizer of LES History Month announcing launch of events soon - walking tours, exhibits, festivals, etc.

  • most events are outdoors, family friendly, and FREE - throughout May!

• Public Theater reps (home of Shakespeare in the Park) announcing summer programming

  • Romeo & Juliet will be Shakespeare in the Park’s free summer show this year, beginning May 22nd

  • also have a mobile unit putting on shows in June at Astor Place

• ABC No Rio rep at 156 Rivington St has a new building opening this fall - space for artists, activists, punks, and the community

  • performance space, computer lab, zine library, and more will be part of the new space

• NYC Dance Parade is coming up in 2.5 weeks on Sat 5/16 at 12 PM, involving over 40 schools each doing 40 seconds of dance

  • dancing to Tompkins Square Park where there will be multiple stages and more performances

• Chinatown YMCA offers a variety of programming both paid and free

  • they have an aquatics program! adults and children learn how to swim classes! family programming! taco tuesday! language classes! free food distribution (every second Friday of the month)! digital literacy classes! financial assistance for interested members!

• Request to deny the Canal St Open Streets request to expand operating hours of the open street due to health issues for residents caused by increased activity on the street

Community Planning Fellow: Final Presentation for Policy Analysis of Affordable Housing Opportunities under City of Yes in CB3

• 20% increase in FAR for Community District 3 in City of Yes (COY) increased allowance of housing stock, mainly along commercial corridors

• Large portion of residents in the LES are rent burdened, most residents also live alone, increasing affordability difficulties

• NISHA campuses occupy significant portion of land in the district

• 59% of lots in the LES were being built below their maximum allowable FAR due to a mix of landmark statuses, school/NISHA campuses, other blockers

• COY provides tax breaks and rezoning opportunities, but does not address issues of cost of building for non-luxury developers

  • this prevents nonprofit and mission-driven developers from accessing COY value unlocks

Elected Officials Reports

• Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal’s Liaison

  • Hold monthly meetings to discuss solutions for rapid response protocols and expand access to legal services for those affected by ICE raids

  • Office has sent out invites for Community Board applicants to participate in group interview sessions

  

  • Re-launched a volunteer corps, see here for details on how to get involved

• District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s Liaison

  • Office is conducting interview on immigration fraud to crack down on fake immigration lawyers

  • resources for free legal services can be found on DA’s website

  • doing a gun buy back on Saturday, 6/13 - see website for more details

• Congressmember Dan Goldman’s Liaison

  • Demanding information on how many people are affected by ICE claiming authority they did not have

    • among many other bills introduced by the Congressmember to reign in ICE

• Assemblymember Grace Lee’s Liaison

  • Introduced legislation to require NY businesses that contract with ICE to make that public in an accessible database

  • Advocating for a food security package in the State budget

• Assemblymember Deborah Glick’s Liaison

  • Urging leadership to push back on Governor’s proposal to roll back climate laws in the latest budget

  • Supports the pied-à-terre tax proposed by Governor Hochul and Mayor Mamdani

  

  • NYCDOT is setting up e-bike battery storage cabinets, deciding this summer where to locate them, to reduce lithium battery fires

    • submit suggestions here, open through July 31st

• Assemblymember Keith Powers’ Liaison

  • Supports Governor’s SEQRA reform efforts to make it easier and faster to build more housing and tackle the affordability crisis

  • Federal government is phasing out the penny, which means sales prices will be rounded up/down to the nearest 0.05

  • Introduced legislation to exempt sales tax for pet food

• State Senator Brian Kavanagh’s Liaison

  • Will continue holding office hours through the summer, attend if you have questions for the State Senator!

• Councilmember Christopher Martre’s Liaison

  • Last week, 15 home care aide workers went on hunger strike in support of Councilmember Martre’s No More 24 bill

    • Speaker Menin recently announced the bill will be advanced, ending the hunger strike

  • Sponsoring street co-naming ceremony to celebrate unveiling of Jack Kirby Way in the LES - Monday, 5/11 at 12 PM on the corner of Delancey St and Essex St

• Councilmember Harvey Epstein - attended!

  • holding a vigil 4/29 7:30 PM for a resident who was killed by gun violence

  • Has a bill to create a new department for student loan borrowers to receive help from the City

Board Reports

• Board Chair’s Report

  • Update on the E 11th St delivery workers bike situation: the Mayor’s new Office of Mass Engagement has been very engaged with all the parties involved to resolve the situation

Committee Reports

See Committee Meeting recordings here!

• Executive

  • Two resolutions were introduced to remove members due to continued low attendance and no improvement following prior notice - motions did not pass in committee

    • bylaws state that members must receive two letters following lack of attendance (absent at more than 33% of meetings), with 6 months between letters, before removal can be considered

  • Resolution to deny open container waiver for streets events, in regard to World Cup events occurring in NYC this summer

    • Executive Committee claims it did not receive any information from the State regarding this waiver program, and while the State would proceed with the program regardless, the committee desired to register its disapproval of not being kept in the loop

    • Resolution was denied by roll call vote of full board

• Landmarks

  • Resolution to approve Certificate of Appropriateness to install a handicap lift at the front of 4 St. Mark’s Place

• Transportation, Public Safety, & Environment

  • Resolution to support all the NYCDOT Open Streets located in CD3

    • also supporting 5-day open street operations on Canal Street, for 3-10 PM

• Land Use, Zoning, Public & Private Housing

  • Resolution to approve St. Augustine’s Church permit to build a 21-story development containing 130 income-restricted units, retail, and religious space

    • requires a Zoning Special Permit due to zoning lot containing a landmark at 290 Henry Street

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