Local Law 218 of 2017
New York City Budget
New York City Spending
Council Member Kallos began advocating for the budget to be published online in 2014.
The City Council advocated for an Open Budget in the City Council Budget Response sent to the administration on April 4, 2016:
The budget is the most important public policy the City regularly makes. As such its transparency is crucial to helping New Yorkers understand how the City spends and raises funding. While OMB publically provides many budget documents, all of them are in portable document format (pdf), making an analysis of them cumbersome at best and impossible at worst. Like other agencies, OMB should publish excel files of its documents such as the supporting schedules, departmental estimates, and other applicable documents.
On May 5, 2016, Council Member Kallos introduced the Open Budget bill, following which the administration announced that it would begin voluntarily publishing certain major budget documents online.
Introduction 1176 of 2016, passed the Council on October 31, 2017 and on December 1, 2017 became Local Law 218 of 2017. The law requires all budget documents to be published online, and requires all online documents to be published in human and computer readable formats, as well as on the Open Data Portal.