Methodology

Where the data comes from

All legislative information on this site — bill numbers, titles, sponsors, committee referrals, actions, roll-call votes, documents and calendar events — comes from LegiScan, which aggregates the official record published by the New York State Legislature. LegiScan data is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

Rising Tide is not the official legislative record. Verify legal and authoritative details with the New York State Legislature. Where a bill has an official New York State page, we link to it directly on the bill page, and that link should be treated as authoritative over anything shown here.

How often it updates

A scheduled job runs once a day and asks LegiScan what has changed. Nothing on this site contacts LegiScan when you load a page — every page you see is served from our own database. That keeps the site fast, keeps it free to run, and means our usage stays far inside the API quota.

LegiScan gives every bill a change hash. If the hash for a bill has not moved since our last run, we do not request its details again. This is why the site can follow hundreds of bills while making only a few hundred requests a month.

Legislative data last updated 5 hours ago (August 17, 2026, UTC)

How bills are selected

New York does not publish a category called “water bills”, so we have to decide what counts. The decision is made in two steps, and both are automatic and rule-based — there is no AI model involved, and no policy summary on this site is machine-generated.

1. Discovery. We run a fixed set of searches against the current session — terms like drinking water, wetlands, PFAS, stormwater, Long Island Sound — to assemble a candidate list.
2. Scoring. Each candidate is scored against a water-policy vocabulary. Terms are weighted by how specific they are: drinking water standard counts far more than water alone. A term in the title counts more than the same term buried in the description. Phrases that look like water but are not — “water down”, “watered stock”, “Waterford” as a place name — are removed before scoring.

The score is normalised to a 0–100 scale. A bill is tracked when it scores 40 or higher. One core water concept in the title clears that bar; one passing mention of water inside a large budget bill does not. The current classifier version is deterministic-1.0.0, and it is recorded on every bill so past decisions stay auditable.

Every bill page shows its score and a plain sentence explaining what matched. If we get one wrong, the reasoning is visible rather than hidden.

Manual corrections

Automatic rules make mistakes in both directions. A person can override the classifier for any individual bill, in either direction, and every override stores a written reason and a timestamp. Where an override is in effect, the bill page says so and shows the reason. Overrides always win over the automatic result.

Topics

The 16 topics on this site are our own editorial categories, not official classifications. A bill is attached to a topic when its text matches that topic’s vocabulary strongly enough, and it can belong to several. A bill is never assigned more than 5 topics, so the strongest connections stay meaningful.

What we show, and who wrote it

Every piece of information on this site is one of three things:

• Official. Taken directly from the legislative record: titles, status, actions, sponsors, votes, documents, hearing notices. We translate status codes into readable labels but never change their meaning.
• Derived. Computed by us from official data: relevance scores, topic assignments, stage summaries, counts and charts.
• Editorial. Written by people at Rising Tide: topic explanations, the wording of this page, and any plain-language bill summary. Editorial text is always labelled as ours where it appears alongside official text.

We do not generate policy summaries automatically. Where a bill has no plain-language summary, the page says so instead of inventing one.

Events and hearings

The calendar covers legislative events attached to bills we track: committee agendas, floor sessions and scheduled hearings, as published through LegiScan. It is not a complete list of public meetings about water in New York — local water board meetings, agency listening sessions and regional planning meetings are not included yet. The software is built so additional event sources can be added later without changing how existing events work.

What we do not know

• Committee membership and chair assignments are not currently included, so we cannot tell you who sits on a committee.
• Most legislative decisions never produce a recorded vote. An absence of votes on a bill page means no roll call was recorded, not that nothing happened.
• Amendments and analyses are only shown when the legislative record publishes them.
• Hearing notices can change or be cancelled after we record them. Always confirm with the official notice before travelling.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, the official source linked on the page takes precedence. We would rather show a gap than fill it with a guess, so anywhere the record is silent, this site says so.