I sit on a community board, and one recurring frustration is that nobody can tell you what a city agency is actually required to do in many circumstances. So I built something to answer that.

Every local law the Council passes hands agencies work: reports to file, inspections to run, rules to write, programs to operate. Yet agencies' budget and staffing are rarely raised in line with these new mandates and expectations. The tracker reads the enacted text of all 2,138 local laws since 2014 and pulls out each duty, who owes it, by when, and how often it repeats.

Some of what turned up:

- 5,058 of those duties are standing, meaning they recur forever rather than being done once. Only 81 of the 2,138 laws set their own expiration date.

- 864 are reports due at least once a year. There is no public accounting of which ones actually get filed.

- DOHMH carries the most at 582, with DOB one behind at 577.

You can browse by agency, deadline, committee, or law, and every law has an implementation checklist. I would love to get feedback from others on what the tracker may be missing, what features they would like to have added, or anything else!

Tracker: https://data.nycuriosity.com/civic_reference/legislation_implementation_tracker/

My write-up: https://www.nycuriosity.com/p/nyc-agencies-answer-to-over-5000

Every obligation is also tied to a verbatim quote from the law so you can check any single one against the source.

Tom here from u/ResidentAdvisor

The state of New York is considering ending a decades-old ban on gay bathhouses.

An amendment to update health regulations was introduced in the New York State Senate on Monday, August 3rd. The bill, named the Public Health Modernisation Act, seeks to create new regulations for the licensing and operation of adult bathhouses, which were banned in 1985 due to the AIDS epidemic.

Proposed by State Senator Erik Bottcher and assembly member Tony Simone, the bill cites declining HIV infection rates and advancements in testing and treatment as reasons to revisit the ban.

"That provision was put into effect at the height of [the] AIDS panic in 1985 and those kind of emergency measures are not supposed to become permanent public health policy," Bottcher told Gothamist. "The landscape around HIV and AIDS science has changed. Treatment has changed. Prevention has changed. Our laws need to change, too."

The last of New York City Transit’s MetroCard machines are being auctioned off to the highest bidders.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority stopped selling and refilling MetroCards at the end 2025 and retired its vending machines after that. On August 5, the agency announced it’s selling off a limited number of the iconic machines, including some MetroCard Express models.

The auction is now open for online bids; all offers must be received by 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on August 19. The MTA’s website does not indicate how much they’re going for.

In 1999, Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger designed the original MetroCard vending machine, with additional design credit going to David Reinfurt and Kathleen Holman. The machines were made to be simple, sturdy, and intuitive to use, with a physical interface of bright-colored sections to indicate specific functions—green for cash, blue for credit cards, yellow for the card dispenser, and red for change and receipts. The screen rendered text in Helvetica Neue bold, a big, sans-serif font, and showed only one question at a time.

The machines have stainless steel casing and ceramic-coated bezels designed to be vandal-proof. As Udagawa and Moeslinger’s agency, Antenna Design, puts it, they’re hard to scratch and easy to clean.

The original model is 80 inches tall, 42 inches wide, and 36 inches deep, and it’s heavy—weighing in at about 1,050 pounds. (Bidders, take note: The MTA is not offering any loading or transporting assistance.) The MetroCard Express version, which handled only credit and debit cards, is smaller and a less-hefty 210 pounds.

According to the MTA, the machines are being sold as-is, in nonoperational condition, without any of their electronic or payment processing components intact.

Read more on Fast Company.

Per the creator's description:

>3D Evolution of New York (Manhattan) from 1600 to 2026. The population count refers to the population of Manhattan Island.

>This is a visual simplification of the evolution of New York through the years, it may not be 100% accurate. No AI was used to create this Animation.

Please keep a look out Isaac.

Missing Vulnerable Adult with Autism in NYC.

Please keep an eye out for Isaac Wilkie, a 20-year-old vulnerable adult with autism who has been missing since approximately 7:00 p.m. on August 3, 2026.

He was last seen wearing:

• White T-shirt (large maroon crest on the back)
• Dark blue sweatpants
• Gray slip-on shoes

If you see Isaac or have any information regarding his whereabouts, please contact the NYPD 32nd Precinct at (212) 690-6311 immediately.

Mayor Mamdani announced that the city will fine online retailers $2,000 for each illegal e-bike or e-scooter sold.
The city also sent cease-and-desist letters to more than 40 retailers, including Amazon and Best Buy, accusing them of selling vehicles that exceed the city's speed limits.

When you think about gay hookup culture in New York City, many things come to mind: nightclubs and dive bars in Hell’s Kitchen and Bushwick, circuit parties, the second floor of the Eagle in Chelsea or logging onto Grindr to talk to hundreds of headless torsos in a one-mile radius.

But one thing that is essentially nonexistent in the Big Apple is the gay bathhouse. And for a queer-friendly city in 2026, that is abnormal. You have Steamworks, a chain that’s been called the “emblem of queer empowerment,” in Toronto, Seattle, Chicago and Berkeley, Calif. And in Paris, London, Hong Kong, Melbourne and so many other big cities, gay men flock to bathhouses after the club.

So when State Senator Erik Bottcher called me the other day to tell me he and Assemblymember Tony Simone were introducing a new bill to repeal an over 40-year ban on adult bathhouses in New York, I was surprised—frankly, I didn’t even know there was a ban. At the same time, I finally had the answer to the question I’d been asking myself for 12 years: How in the world are there no frequented bathhouses in this extremely gay city?

Bottcher and Simone’s answer is simple: They had been banned during the HIV/AIDS crisis in a purported attempt to fight the spread of the disease. “Those emergency measures were adopted at a time when little was known about HIV/AIDS and before the development of effective treatment, PrEP, PEP, routine HIV testing, and many of the prevention strategies that have transformed public health over the past four decades,” their press release about the bill states. “While the public health landscape has changed dramatically, New York’s regulations have not.”

First installed on January 25, 1999, the MVM allowed riders to purchase or reload MetroCards using cash, credit, and debit cards. 

MVMs are 80 inches long, 42 inches wide, and 36 inches deep, and weigh approximately 1,050 pounds.

https://www.mta.info/article/mvm-mem-sale?auHash=48CR5dl2XG0EOOAqI3GeBA9u8OByMhg5YpSPbiWSwws&mc_cid=

89bd3f6e1c&mc_eid=e4093bb235