BetaNYC · Council District 4

Your district,
on the record.

Grounded AI over New York City's own open data. Built by BetaNYC, in the open.

Prepared for Council Member Virginia Maloney and staff. Every figure carries the date it was verified. Five questions, then we want to hear yours.

Opening

"You're seven months in. Rather than tell you what this does, I'm going to ask it five questions your office actually gets, and show you what a web search returns for the same question."

⚠️ In 311 queries the district is the string '04', zero-padded. Querying '4' returns zero rows with no error. Districts 1 to 9 only.

⚠️ Her first discretionary budget is FY2027. FY2026 was adopted before she was seated, and querying it by her surname correctly returns nothing. Don't let that read as a tool failure.

Runtime is about 20 minutes. To land in 12, cut Act 5 (calendar) and Act 3b (the digital equity thread). Never cut the profile slide — conceding the easy case is what makes the rest credible — and never cut Act 4, which is the sharpest contrast in the deck.

Each act carries an "Also here" strip naming what else that connector does. Don't read them aloud. They're for the staffer photographing the screen.

What we plugged in

Seven connectors, straight into
the city's own records.

Council legislationBills, hearings, sponsors, votes 21,467 bills · 17,314 events

Charter, Code & RulesFull text, by section 22,131 sections

City budgetSchedule C, capital, terms 33,638 awards · FY2015–FY2027

311Service requests, status, calendar live

The City RecordProcurement and public notices live

NY State legislationBills, laws, members 231,107 bills

Open data catalogAny dataset on the portal SoQL

A web search cannot reach inside a portal's search form. Crawlers see the search box, not the results.
It cannot join four of these in one question.
It cannot hand you a citation you can put in a letter.
It cannot tell you when the answer last changed.

Ninety seconds, then move

This is the "what did you actually build" slide. Do not explain what MCP is. Nobody in a council office needs the plumbing. Name the seven sources, then read the four bullets, then get into the questions.

"Seven pipes into what the city already publishes. The interesting part isn't the list, it's the four things underneath it that no amount of searching gets you."

⚠️ Citywide spending (Checkbook NYC) is deliberately not on this slide. Imperva bot protection has fronted the site including its documented API since around 2026-07-16. Do not promise contract or spending data. A letter to the Comptroller requesting access is drafted. If asked, say it plainly: it's built, the city is currently blocking it, and we're asking.

⚠️ Don't say "Google" from the podium unless you re-ran it on Google yourself. These were run through a general web search. The point holds either way and the precision costs you nothing.

Start with the easy one

Who is the member?

›

A web search run 2026-07-27

Staff Directory — Virginia Maloneycouncil.nyc.gov
Meet Council Member Virginia Maloneymurrayhillnyc.org
Virginia Maloneyballotpedia.org · wikipedia.org · linkedin.com
Phone, district email, office hours, committeeassembled from several pages

Honestly? This one it does well. Contact details, a bio, a committee.

The connector verified 2026-07-27

PersonId 7894 · active · District4@council.nyc.govthe key that joins to everything else
Committee on Economic Development — listed contact, 7 membersindependently confirmed, not taken from the web
Legistar profile, linkablelegistar.council.nyc.gov · PersonId 329370
Record last modified 2025-11-06 — before she took officeso treat the district address as possibly stale

Same facts, plus the ID that joins them and a date that tells you what to distrust.

Also here get_council_member any member list_committees all 73 bodies get_committee roster and volume

Concede this one. It buys you the next five.

Do not oversell the left column here. A web search is genuinely good at "who is this person." It found her phone, her district email, her office hours and her committee. Say so out loud. Conceding the easy case is what makes the room believe you on the hard ones.

"I'm going to start with the one question a search engine handles well, so you know I'm not selling you something. Now watch what happens when we ask what she's done."

The right column's real content is the last two lines. PersonId 7894 is the key that joins her to 46 votes, 77 budget awards and a committee. And the record carries a last-modified date.

⚠️ The two sources disagree on the district office address, and this is worth telling her staff. Legistar carries 211 East 43rd Street, Suite 1205. The web returns 420 Lexington Avenue, Suite 650. The Legistar record was last modified 2025-11-06, before she was seated, which points to Legistar being the stale one. Do not assert which is correct. Show the disagreement, note the date, and let her office tell you. It reads as a service, not a gotcha.

⚠️ Say "listed contact," not "Chair." The Legistar field is BodyContactNameId, which for council committees is conventionally the chair but does not literally say so. The web reports her as Chair of Economic Development. Two sources agreeing is good; overstating what our field says is exactly the failure this deck is about.

Act 1 Your district, right now

What are people calling about?

›

A web search run 2026-07-27

Which NYC Neighborhoods Receive the Most 311 Complaints?violationwatch.nyc
District Infocouncil.nyc.gov
Report Problemsportal.311.nyc.gov
NYC 311 Complaint Data — database product docsmotherduck.com
City Council Member Complaint — how to complain about a memberportal.311.nyc.gov
+ 4 more

Nine links to portals and tools. Not one number.

The connector 311 verified 2026-07-21

Illegal Parking

735

Encampment

390

Homeless Person Assistance

242

Noise

207

Street Condition

197

Vendor Enforcement

193

4,767 requests, ranked. The answer, not the door to it.

Also here get_calendar alternate-side parking and collection get_service_request one request by number get_status agency status socrata any dataset on the portal

Act 1

The left column is the whole point here. Every result is a place you could go to look it up yourself. One is documentation for a database product. One is the 311 page for filing a complaint about a council member, which matched on the words.

"Nine results, and every one of them is a door. Not one of them walked through it."

Where to linger on the right. Encampment and Homeless Person Assistance at #2 and #3 is a distinctive signature. District 10 uptown has no homelessness category in its top five at all. Same city, same thirty days, completely different constituent pressure.

⚠️ Don't editorialize past the data. This measures what residents called 311 about, which is complaint behavior as much as underlying conditions. Say that out loud if the room starts drawing policy conclusions.

⚠️ These counts are from 2026-07-21 and were NOT re-pulled. Re-run before the meeting or say the date aloud. The chip on the slide is gray, not green, for exactly this reason.

Act 2 Your roll call

One returns pages about you.
The other returns your votes.

›

A web search run 2026-07-27

Virginia Maloneyballotpedia.org
Wins Handily in District 4 Council Raceourtownny.com
Carolyn Maloney — a different Maloneyballotpedia.org
District 4 — Virginia Maloneycouncil.nyc.gov
Voting Members 2020–2021 — Cornell student assemblyassembly.cornell.edu
+ 4 more

Nine pages about a person. Zero votes.

The connector verified 2026-07-27

46 matters, each with a file number and date2026-06-30 and 2026-07-16 sessions
Res 0551-2026 — Expense budget designationsAffirmative · the resolution behind Act 3
Res 0546-2026 — FY2027 tax levyAffirmative
LU 0112-2026 — East Harlem/El Barrio Article XIAffirmative
Int 0972-2026 — Unincorporated business tax creditAffirmative · intro.nyc/0972-2026

Every one citable. Plus the full 51-member split on any matter.

Also here co_sponsors who signed on, and who didn't get_bill_history every action, in order get_bill_hearings where a bill was heard aggregate_bills counts by sponsor and session

⚠️ Rewritten 2026-07-27 — votes shipped over the weekend

⚠️ district-04.md Act 2 is stale and contradicts this slide. It still says get_voting_record raises a named error because the votes table has zero rows. It no longer does. Do not run the meeting off the Markdown until that act is rewritten.

Left column. Point at the two orange lines. A search for her voting record returns Carolyn Maloney, who served in Congress, and a Cornell graduate student assembly roster. Both rank because the words match.

"Nine results, not one of them a vote, and two aren't even about you. It isn't lying to you. It has no idea it missed."

Right column. vote_breakdown("Int 0983-2026") returns the full split: 51 recorded, 42 affirmative, 6 negative, 1 abstain, plus the committee stage. Named negatives, named abstention, named absences.

⚠️ Int 0983-2026 is the elected-official compensation bill. Public record, and she voted Affirmative, but leading with her own pay raise in her own office reads as a gotcha. Drill down on Res 0551-2026 or Int 0972-2026 unless she asks.

⚠️ All 46 came back Affirmative. Real, not an artifact: the same session shows six named negatives from other members. But it covers two sessions only. Do not characterize it as a voting philosophy.

⚠️ get_voting_record returns 50 rows for 46 distinct matters — some items appear at both committee and full council. Dedupe by file_number before saying a count aloud.

Act 3 Your first budget

The record is thin.
The budget is not.

›

A web search run 2026-07-27

FY2027 Discretionary Funding Policies and Procedures (PDF)council.nyc.gov
City Council Discretionary Fundingnyc.gov/veterans
District 4 — Virginia Maloneycouncil.nyc.gov
FY27 supplementary applications — Oswald Feliz, D15council.nyc.gov
Alexa Avilés — D38council.nyc.gov

The rules for how funding works, plus two other members' pages. Zero of her 77 awards.

The connector re-verified live 2026-07-27

$1,538,000

FY2027 Schedule C

77

Awards

$200,000	Assn. of Community Employment Programs for the Homeless	NYC Cleanup
$70,000	Department of Sanitation	NYC Cleanup, CD 4
$50,000	STPCV Tenants Association Foundation	Speaker's Initiative
$40,000	Justice Innovation, Inc.	Community Safety

By name, initiative, and administering agency.

Also here search_capital_projects §254 capital get_awards_by_ein one org across all members get_terms_conditions the strings attached get_legistar_link back to the adopting resolution

Act 3

The left column here is the sharpest of the five. A search for what she funded returns the rules for discretionary funding, and then two other members' pages. Feliz is District 15, Avilés is District 38.

"It found the policy manual and two of your colleagues. Not one of your seventy-seven awards."

"This is the thing that is yours after seven months, and it's a million and a half of it."

⚠️ Always pass limit: 200 or higher. An earlier draft shipped "$1,148,000" from a query capped at 40 that returned exactly 40 rows. The limit truncates the total as well as the list. Understated her budget by $390,000. Treat "returned exactly N against a limit of N" as truncation until proven otherwise.

⚠️ council_member matches as a substring and the result depends on fiscal year. FY2027 is safe. On FY2020 to FY2026 a "Powers" search silently sums Keith Powers and Brooks-Powers across two districts. Check the sponsor column, state the fiscal year aloud.

Query Schedule C by sponsoring member surname, never by district number. There is no district filter, and asking by district silently returns citywide awards.

Act 3 The digital equity thread

$80,000 into digital inclusion,
in a first budget.

$20,000	Fund for the City of New York [AI Training Program]	this is BetaNYC
$20,000	Older Adults Technology Services (OATS)	Older Adults Digital Literacy
$20,000	Simon Wiesenthal Center	Digital Equity Program
$20,000	WNET	Arts Broadcasting

All four under the Digital Inclusion and Literacy Initiative, administered by DYCD. Fund for the City of New York is BetaNYC's fiscal sponsor, so our awards appear under its name.

Handle this one with care

The strongest version is not leading with "you already fund us." Run the demo straight, let the agent surface the award from the public record alongside the other three, and only then note that one of those lines is us. The tool finding your own funding in the same query that found everyone else's is far more persuasive than saying so up front, and it keeps the meeting about her office's data rather than about an ask.

⚠️ Do NOT characterize how that decision was made. Nothing in the data supports a claim about her office's internal process, and BetaNYC is the grantee of the line in question. Say what the record shows and stop.

The data subtlety, if the room is engaged: FCNY is a fiscal sponsor, a passthrough carrying dozens of programs under one EIN (13-2612524). "Fund for the City of New York" in the recipient column is not the actual grantee. The [AI Training Program] bracket is. Filtering by organization alone would silently merge unrelated grantees. This is exactly what makes a naive spreadsheet analysis wrong.

Act 4 The Charter, Code and Rules

Looking at NYC's Laws

Roughly right is not citable.

›

A web search run 2026-07-27

Mayor's Office press releasenyc.gov/mayors-office
NYC sidewalk scaffolding reformsnbcnewyork.com
Sidewalk Sheds NYC: New 90-Day Rules — permit expediter's blogpermitexpertsnyc.com
NYC Sidewalk Shed Rules — marketing blogskybriz.com
2025 Laws That Could Reshape Sidewalk Sheds — engineering firm's blograndpc.com

Nine secondary sources. Approximately right. Not one is the law.

The connector verified 2026-07-27

§ 28-105.8.1 Duration of permit"Sidewalk shed permits shall be issued for a period of 90 days and may not be renewed until department penalties… are paid."

§ 28-220.1 Penalties$10 / $100 / $200 per linear foot per month by shed age, capped at $6,000. Exception: one- and two-family homes.

The section, the amending law (L.L. 2025/048), and the date it took effect (1/12/2026).

Also here get_section any citation, exact list_titles browse the Code by title get_version what the corpus is current through Rules as well as Charter and Administrative Code

Act 4 — the sharpest contrast in the deck. Don't cut it.

This is the subtle one, and the strongest. The web search got the headline roughly right: 90 days, $6,000 cap. So resist the urge to say it failed. It didn't. It's unciteable, and it's imprecise in a way that costs you.

"It got the number right. Now look at where it got it: a press release, a TV station, and three blogs belonging to companies that sell permit expediting. You cannot put any of those in a letter to DOB."

Then the precision point, which is the kill shot. The web summary says penalties apply to sheds "standing longer than 180 days." The statute says something different: penalties begin at the second renewal, and only where work is not in progress, tiered by how long the shed has existed. Roughly 180 days is a blog's paraphrase of a rule whose actual test is the work, not the clock.

"Close enough to sound right in a meeting. Wrong enough to lose the argument when the owner's lawyer shows up."

And the exemption. One- and two-family homes are exempt, as are sheds up for new building, enlargement, or demolition. That appears in the statute and in none of the blogs. It is exactly the detail a constituent letter has to get right.

⚠️ Charter search is keyword matching, not semantic. sidewalk shed returns nine results. noise nighttime construction and heat season residential temperature both return zero. Rehearse your queries. Improvising a phrasing in the room will demo an empty result set.

⚠️ Always read the legal disclaimer if anyone treats this as advice. It's research material, not legal advice, and the corpus is current through Local Law 2026/116 — not necessarily through today.

Act 5 What's in front of the Council

Agendas before the meeting,
not minutes after it.

›

A web search run 2026-07-27

Upcoming Public Hearings — Land Usecouncil.nyc.gov
citymeetings.nyccitymeetings.nyc
Calendar and agenda (raw document link)nyc.legistar.com/View.ashx
Council Hearing on SoHo Rezoning Plan — an old rezoning storycbsnews.com
Hearings — LPCnyc.gov/site/lpc

Portals, a raw file link, and a stale news story. No agenda for this week.

The connector verified 2026-07-27

2026-08-04 Subcommittee on Landmarks, Public Sitings, Resiliency and Dispositions agenda final250 Broadway, 8th Floor, Hearing Room 1
2026-08-04 Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises agenda final250 Broadway, 8th Floor, Hearing Room 1
2026-08-04 Committee on Land Use deferred250 Broadway, 8th Floor, Hearing Room 1

Body, room, date, and whether the agenda is actually settled.

Also here get_event_bills what's on a given agenda get_upcoming_hearings full agenda text search_events past meetings nyc-record-mcp public hearing notices citywide

Act 5

The honest detail is the third row. Land Use shows Deferred, not Final. The tool distinguishes a settled agenda from an unsettled one, so you know which meetings you can plan around.

"Two of these you can plan around. The third one it's telling you not to trust yet. That distinction is the difference between a calendar and a guess."

"For a new member's office still building its calendar muscle, this is the least glamorous and most immediately useful thing here."

⚠️ get_upcoming_hearings is extremely verbose — land use items run to hundreds of block-and-lot references. Use upcoming_events for the overview, as shown, and only drill into a single event's agenda on request.

⚠️ Re-run before the meeting. These are 2026-08-04 events; if you present after that date the slide is simply wrong.

Closing

As your record grows, the
empty answers fill in.

Six days ago the voting question came back empty and we would have shown you a graceful failure. It shipped over the weekend. That is what building in the open looks like.

What is the constituent question that takes your office the longest to answer?The product specification
Where do you go now, and what breaks?Usually: email the agency and wait
What would you need to show the member for this to be worth ten minutes of your day?The adoption bar

github.com/BetaNYC/grounding-ai-with-ny-open-data · beta.nyc

Web searches run 2026-07-27 and reproduced verbatim. Budget re-verified 2026-07-27 via @betanyc/nyc-budget-mcp v1.3.0. Votes, Charter, calendar and committee figures verified live 2026-07-27. 311 figures verified 2026-07-21. Charter corpus current through Local Law 2026/116. Legal material is for research purposes only and does not constitute legal advice; verify current text at codelibrary.amlegal.com.

Close, then shut up and listen

"BetaNYC built these connectors and guides in the open. Any office can point its own AI at the real city and state record instead of trusting it to remember."

Write the answers down. Every question they try today, working or not, becomes a test case. The failures are worth more than the successes.

⚠️ Do not recite District 4's boundaries as authoritative. The neighborhood list in district-04.md is inferred from award recipients, not from a districting source.

Backup prompts if one falls flat: alternate-side parking suspensions (311, always returns something) · FY2027 Digital Inclusion awards citywide · what the Charter says about Council oversight powers · NYC legislation on broadband access (returns Int 1122-2024, enacted 2025-11-08).

Your district,on the record.

Seven connectors, straight intothe city's own records.

Who is the member?

A web search run 2026-07-27

The connector verified 2026-07-27

What are people calling about?

A web search run 2026-07-27

The connector 311 verified 2026-07-21

One returns pages about you.The other returns your votes.

A web search run 2026-07-27

The connector verified 2026-07-27

The record is thin.The budget is not.

A web search run 2026-07-27

The connector re-verified live 2026-07-27

$80,000 into digital inclusion,in a first budget.

Looking at NYC's Laws

A web search run 2026-07-27

The connector verified 2026-07-27

Agendas before the meeting,not minutes after it.

A web search run 2026-07-27

The connector verified 2026-07-27

As your record grows, theempty answers fill in.

Your district,
on the record.

Seven connectors, straight into
the city's own records.

One returns pages about you.
The other returns your votes.

The record is thin.
The budget is not.

$80,000 into digital inclusion,
in a first budget.

Agendas before the meeting,
not minutes after it.

As your record grows, the
empty answers fill in.