Council Insights

A roll call follows the outcome, not the controversy

Share of bills that carry a recorded vote, grouped by how the bill ended. Bills that became law almost always have one. Bills that lapsed almost never do.

Every council term does it

Bills that lapsed with an empty roll call, by the four-year term they were introduced in. Pending legislation dies when a term ends, so the term a bill was introduced in is the term it died at the end of. The current term is absent because its bills are still moving.

What the bill was about

Share of bills in each category that lapsed without a recorded vote. Education, public safety and health sit at the top; the things a city does every day, zoning and transportation, sit at the bottom. Select any bar to browse exactly those bills.

These are the same categories as the filter on the legislation page. A bill usually carries several tags, so it can fall into more than one category and the totals add up to more than the number of bills. Categories with at least 60 bills.

The same thing in finer detail

The same question against the raw tags rather than the categories above, for tags on at least 60 bills. This is where the sharp findings are: ethics and elections sit at the top, the two subjects Council was least willing to put to a vote, and the rules governing Council itself are what both are about. Both vanish into Government at the coarser grain.

Subjects come from the tags on each bill, and a bill usually carries several, so one bill can appear under more than one subject and the totals add up to more than the number of bills.

Where bills go to die

Share of each committee's bills that lapsed without a recorded vote. A bill referred to Law and Government was five times likelier to die unvoted than one sent to Parks and Recreation. Committees with at least 50 bills; the number in brackets is how many it handled.

Whose bills die

Share of each member's bills that lapsed without a recorded vote, for members who introduced at least 80. The spread is wide enough that it is not about how busy a term was: it runs from under 5 percent to nearly three quarters.

Read it as a measure of what a member chose to introduce, not of how well they did the job. Members who put forward a lot of position-taking legislation that was never going to move will sit high on this list, and a member whose bills were mostly routine neighbourhood business will sit low.