Data Sources

Data: Legislation, votes, sponsors, bill status

The Legistar Web API is queried daily to fetch recent legislative introductions and council votes. Data is stored in our database and displayed on the Track Legislation and Voting History pages.

Legistar is the official legislative management system used by the NYC Council. All bill text, vote records, and sponsor information come directly from this system.

Data: Active construction permits in District 40

The NYC Department of Buildings permit issuance dataset is queried for active permits in Council District 40. Work types such as New Building, Demolition, Renovation, Solar, and Structural are surfaced on the What's New page and homepage.

Permit data reflects what has been approved by DOB and may not yet reflect work visible on the ground.

Data: New business licenses in District 40

The NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) licensing dataset is queried for active business licenses issued in Council District 40 within the past six months. Results appear on the What's New page and homepage.

Businesses shown have active licenses from DCWP. Not all operating businesses require a DCWP license.

Data: Real-time subway and bus alerts

Transit alerts are fetched live from the MTA's GTFS-RT service alerts feed, filtered to routes serving District 40 (2, 5, B, Q, B41, B44, B49).

Alert text is provided by the MTA as-is and is not translated.

Data: Brooklyn and NYC local news headlines

RSS feeds from Gothamist, The City, and City Limits are fetched and displayed on the homepage. Articles are filtered and sorted by publication date.

Articles link directly to their original source. OpenBorough does not produce or edit any news content.

Data: AI-generated legislation summaries, daily briefing, and page translations

Claude is used to generate plain-language summaries of legislation, a daily legislative briefing shown on the homepage, and translations of content into Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Bengali.

AI-generated content is a convenience feature. It is not an official interpretation of any legislation.

Data: Council Member contact information

Representative contact details for Council Member Rita Joseph are sourced from the official NYC Council website and manually maintained.

Data: State and federal representative lookup

Rather than maintaining a database of state and federal representatives, the site links directly to the official NYS Senate lookup tool and Vote.gov for finding elected officials by address.

Data: Community resources and city services directory

The Local Resources and City Services pages are hand-curated lists of organizations, programs, and services known to serve District 40 residents. Information is sourced from each organization's own website.

If you notice outdated or incorrect information, please report it via GitHub.

Data: Capital investments and commitments in District 40

The CPDB is maintained by NYC's Department of City Planning (DCP) and tracks capital projects across all five boroughs. The Budget Tracker page queries this dataset for capital commitments relevant to District 40, supplemented by curated FY2026 project data when live results are unavailable.

Dollar amounts in the raw dataset are reported in thousands.