Legislative Bodies
State assemblies. State senates. City councils that write law. The U.S. Congress. These are the bodies that draft, debate, and enact the rules everyone else is supposed to follow. When they fail, they fail quietly — and the failure is invisible until you measure the gap between what was said and what got voted.
Common accountability gaps in this area
- Bills can die in committee with no public record of why. Multiple New York condominium ombudsman bills in recent years have not reached a floor vote.
- Sponsors sometimes introduce legislation that does not advance out of committee.
- Disclosure requirements on outside income, gifts, and travel are sometimes filed late or incompletely, with minimal consequence.
- Hearing scheduling can limit public attendance.
- Floor votes can contradict stated positions, and those contradictions are not always aggregated or published.
What TASFGA will track
- Bill lifecycle — every bill TASFGA supports or opposes, from drafting to enactment to enforcement
- Sponsor scorecards — stated position, vote record, follow-through
- Committee ledger — what got heard, what got buried, and who buried it
- Disclosure compliance — financial, gift, travel filings — on time, accurate, or neither
- Promise vs. vote index — aggregated contradictions between public statements and legislative votes
Evidence carried over from Focus 1
The bill lifecycle described above is not hypothetical here. Focus 1 has produced a working instance of every ledger this area of focus proposes to keep, in a single legislative domain, over more than a decade.
- A bill graveyard with names on it. Repeated attempts to create an ombudsman for residential community associations in New York have been introduced and have not reached a floor vote. The pattern is the one this area of focus exists to measure: a bill is filed, it is referred, it is not heard, and the following session it is filed again. Nothing in the public record explains the interval, which is precisely the finding.
- A companion-bill gap. A Senate bill carried across multiple sessions with no Assembly companion cannot pass, and the absence of the companion is a more informative fact than any floor speech about the bill. It is also invisible unless someone is tracking both chambers against each other.
- Ten drafted bills, with their choke points identified. Focus 1 has produced model statutory language covering licensure and registry, owner standing and enforcement, financial disclosure, procurement and vendor conflicts, building safety, and an ombudsman with a fixed resolution deadline. Each is drafted against a documented gap and mapped to the committee stage at which comparable bills have previously stopped.
- Sponsor turnover as a tracked risk. Where a bill depends on a single sponsor, that sponsor's departure ends the bill. Tracking the dependency in advance is a measurement any legislative scorecard should make, and almost none do.
The drafted bills and the choke-point analysis are published at condoscoopsnyc.org/legislation. What Focus 1 has not yet built, and what this area of focus would add, is the promise-versus-vote index — the aggregation that makes a contradiction between a stated position and a recorded vote findable by anyone.
Why this matters
A legislature that does not meet its own published rules erodes public trust. Accountability here is not partisan. It is arithmetic. Was the bill filed? Did it get a hearing? Did the vote match the speech? The answers exist in the record. TASFGA aims to put them in one place and keep them there.