Council Insights
Explore Philadelphia City Council legislative activity.
Council legislates the city, not itself
The two subjects Council is least willing to put to a vote are ethics and elections, where 68% and 66% of bills lapsed without a recorded vote. They are also two of the subjects it produces least: 23 and 18 laws across 2000 to 2023. Both are about the rules governing Council itself.
Over the same years Council signed 1,888 zoning laws, about 82 times as many, and 15% of zoning bills died unvoted against 68% for ethics. The pattern is not that Council avoids hard subjects. It is that the subjects it reliably acts on are the ones about the physical city, and the ones it reliably does not are the ones that would bind Council.