Talk:New York City Council

Absent Articles

There are at least ten-by my count-or more City Council members who don't yet have articles devoted to them, but who arguably deserve them.

DeBlasio, Gentile, and Monserrate without question, Rivera, Baez and Kendell Stewart as well, with a few others also being at least marginally notable.

I created the article on Larry Seabrook, and have tried to add some material to the pre-existing article on David Yassky, but will try to get some of the others started soon.

Ruthfulbarbarity 00:46, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

External Links

It's a bit odd to have just the Vacca link from this page. any other Members have meaningful unofficial sites?

"President of the City Council"

There is also no mention of the "President of the City Council", Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum.

Wasn't this presidency abolished fifteen or twenty years ago? Jim.henderson 17:44, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Actually in the 1994 Charter revision the President of the Council was converted into the Public Advocate's position. The Public Advocate is an ad-hoc member of all committees and can introduce legislation.

Thanks. Also I see that "The Public Advocate presides over all stated meetings of the New York City Council." but the term "stated meeting" is not defined or its importance described. Are such meetings special, or are many meetings "stated"? Jim.henderson (talk) 16:37, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Map of the breakdown of council districts

Some type of map of the districts that the city breaks down into would be very very useful. ZueJay (talk) 17:23, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Agreed, I want to colour in a map to show the voting on New York congestion pricing, but was sad to discover there is no base map on Wikimedia for it. --Padraic 15:15, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Partisan breakdown

The partisan breakdown of the City Council was incorrect and has now been fixed. There are five (5) Republican members as of 2012 -- Council Members Oddo, Ignizio, Koo, Halloran, and Ulrich. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.14.227.102 (talk) 19:51, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Vacancies and partisan breakdown

Presently, the table shows 45 Democrats, 2 Republicans, 1 Working Families Party member and 3 vacancies (total 51). Originally, there were 3 Republicans: 2 from Staten Island and 1 from Queens. How should the text (which I may have written) be changed? Should one of the 3 Republican councilmen in the template be flagged or replaced by "Vacant"? —— Shakescene (talk) 19:23, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

why are valid edits reverted?

i don't wish to become involved in an edit war, but i believe the edits and clarifications i made were constructive, the tags i added are valid and the changes are in line with the guidelines of WP:MOS. please do not categorically revert an editor's changes. please explain why all changes (or virtually all changes) were reverted. --98.113.187.11 (talk) 10:44, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Hi, I certainly don't like undoing someone else's hard work, but a batch reversion was the only way I could handle several problems, and I'm sure several good edits that I'd readily support got lost in the process. Breaking up the columns was a good idea which I did follow, but in a less extreme way (four or five short columns are hard to read across in my browser on my screen, for example, but separate columns for each title of presiding officer makes sense.) Expanding the headers on the Council membership table made the table much harder to read, and it wasn't really necessary given the surrounding matter to explain D, R and WF. Don't feel that I (or anyone else) will jump angrily on each edit you make. —— Shakescene (talk) 01:43, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Partisan breakdown redux

Maybe it is difficult to keep track of. Is there a reason the second paragraph says "There are 47 Democratic council members..." when several other places in the article it says 46 Democrats?    → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 02:01, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Is this ok now?--38.98.96.194 (talk) 20:20, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

External links modified (February 2018)

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Capitalizing "public advocate"

@Shakescene: You are correct that "public advocate" is a title; as such, its capitalization within Wikipedia is covered by its Manual of Style, MOS:JOBTITLES. The MoS does not even capitalize "king", 'emperor" or "pope", except in three very special cases. Please follow WP's style. Chris the speller ^yack 14:16, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

Map of Districts

Created this map using NYC Open Data. I propose adding it to the page:

Map of the 51 council districts of New York City.

- DutchTreat (talk) 12:23, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

Map added into Composition section. - DutchTreat (talk) 14:46, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Maps of individual districts

@RoySmith, Beetstra, and WhatamIdoing: Based upon what was being discussed at WP:ELN#New York City Council, I asked at WP:GL/M#New York City Council about the possibility of creating maps to use in the article instead of the external links currently being used. DutchTreat was able to create a map for all the districts combined (see #Map of District) and for the individual districts (see User:DutchTreat/Projects/Maps/nyc-council-districts) using freely available data. This is, at least in my opinion, a better option than the links. There might be some formatting issues (e.g. sizing) that will need to be resolved, but it seems as if simply copying and pasting the syntax from DutchTreat's sandbox into the "Maps" column should work OK. An example of how this might look using is as follows.

Size: 250 x 250

District	Member	Party	Residence	Borough	Elected	Term limited	Map
1	Margaret Chin	Democratic	Financial District	Manhattan	2009	2021
2	Carlina Rivera	Democratic	Lower East Side	Manhattan	2017	2025

Size: 200 x 200

District	Member	Party	Residence	Borough	Elected	Term limited	Map
1	Margaret Chin	Democratic	Financial District	Manhattan	2009	2021
2	Carlina Rivera	Democratic	Lower East Side	Manhattan	2017	2025

Size: 150 x 150

District	Member	Party	Residence	Borough	Elected	Term limited	Map
1	Margaret Chin	Democratic	Financial District	Manhattan	2009	2021
2	Carlina Rivera	Democratic	Lower East Side	Manhattan	2017	2025

Size 100 x 100

District	Member	Party	Residence	Borough	Elected	Term limited	Map
1	Margaret Chin	Democratic	Financial District	Manhattan	2009	2021
2	Carlina Rivera	Democratic	Lower East Side	Manhattan	2017	2025

Comments

Does anyone have any concerns about incorporating these maps into the table? Note that the individual maps that DutchTreat created are zoomable and expandable; so, even if the size is kept small for table purposes, the reader can zoom in or expand the map if they want. -- Marchjuly (talk) 01:35, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Those look good to me. Thank you, @DutchTreat. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:19, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Marchjuly, Awesome. Thanks to everybody involved. -- RoySmith (talk) 04:06, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Marchjuly, great, thanks! Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 04:21, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

I agree, I was skeptical, but they look good. I think 150px is the way to go. I'd say smaller the better, but the outset box is invariable in size and it covers too much of the districts. If that were able to not be superimposed on the map, then 100 would be the way to go - still readable and gives a general sense of location, the reader would have to already be largely familiar with NYC in any size. JesseRafe (talk) 18:49, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

JesseRafe Thanks for the feedback. I agree small is better. I don't know of anyway to eliminate the outset box. @RoySmith, Beetstra, and WhatamIdoing:Is there consensus for using a size of 150px? - DutchTreat (talk) 20:30, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

DutchTreat you can make the outset box go away with visibility.mw-kartographer-fullScreen: hidden, but I don't know the correct wiki syntax to embed that in the page. I tried a few variations on <span style="..."> and never found the right incantation. And, once you've done that, you still need to wire up a way that clicking on the maplet gets you to the bigger version. -- RoySmith (talk) 21:24, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

@RoySmith, the answer probably involves Wikipedia:TemplateStyles.

I think that 150px functional size. As small as possible, without being too small. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:55, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and incorporated the maps into the article at the 150x150 size. The size can always be adjusted as needed. -- Marchjuly (talk) 07:24, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

• @Marchjuly: is there a way to force all the maplets to be the same scale? For example, districts 31 and 32 are directly adjacent to each other, but due to their shapes, are shown at very different scales. It would also be good if they could be scaled down to show more context. For district 27, for example, it's just an irregular shape with no feel for where it is because you don't see enough of the surrounding area. Not that these aren't great, just looking for ways to make them even better :-) -- RoySmith (talk) 15:00, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

@RoySmith: To get a consistent scale, then each map has a specified "zoom" level in the Commons geodata. Most of the maps are using level 13. However, I changed some of them to be level 12 to include the whole district. To get consistency, then all of the maps will either need to go to zoom level 13 which would clip a few of the outsides or go to zoom level 12 which would make many districts small. I changed District 31 to level 13 to give everyone an idea what happens. Let me know your thoughts. - DutchTreat (talk) 10:45, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

I inspected Distrct 27 Commons:Data:New York City Council District 27.map. It is using zoom level 13. The lack of context at this scale might justify using zoom level 12. - DutchTreat (talk) 11:14, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Term limits: 2025 or 2029 or 2033 (2021 and 2023 elections for 2 years, not 4)

Is 2029 correct? In 2001 and 2003, the two year terms were not affected by the current limits, so there's no precedent. As I understand the law, it is limiting to "two four-year elected terms". Is it two terms, two full-four year terms, two full four-year terms plus extra time (from mid-term specials)? Or just 8 years (plus extra for specials) from election? Most news sources haven't started (or ever!) really addressed this in all the election write-ups. If it's two terms, then the limit is reached in 2025. If it's two full four-year terms, then it's not til 2033 after being elected in 2025 and 2029 (four elected terms!). Or if it's the term that ends after the eighth year in office is reached (my personal interpretation based on the analog of how those who finished prior electeds' terms), then it would be 2029 (three elected terms, plus extra for some), as currently added by 24.189.117.158. Any other thoughts? JesseRafe (talk) 20:38, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Caucuses

We should start a section on these to outline what some of them actually do. Wikitikitengo2 (talk) 04:58, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

I don't think so. They're almost all just "demographic" groups based on self-identity, and the only one with a stance rather than a demographic in its name, like the same one in the U.S. House, the "progressive" caucus is just a label for those who wish to be in it, not a strong barometer of progressivism or a stance on an issue. Same for the Women's, BLAC, Irish, Jewish, LGBT - just an open entry and then what? Just don't think they're useful to be described here or even if we did, what reputable sources write anything substantive about them? JesseRafe (talk) 14:13, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

@Mosesbrazas: Please join the discussion here if you would like to expand the caucus section with additional information. JesseRafe (talk) 16:56, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

Whips in infobox

Can someone explain why the majority and minority whips are listed in the infobox? I'm curious as to why it's done here but not in articles about state legislatures. Derpytoucan (talk) 02:12, 5 November 2023 (UTC)