Sous anglè: Read a budget request and the answer to it

Sous anglè: Your task

Sous anglè: Every year each of the city's 59 community boards sends the city a list of things it wants in the budget, and the agency responsible for each one writes an answer. Both the requests and the answers are published, and the answer to a request can be rewritten between one budget publication and the next.

Sous anglè: This page reads one of them end to end, using Brooklyn Community Board 14's requests for fiscal year

1. Sous anglè: When you have finished you will be able to read any board's list the same way, and — the part that is easy to get wrong — tell an answer that actually changed from one where only the budget label around it moved.

Sous anglè: Before you start

• Sous anglè: No account is needed.
• Sous anglè: This works with JavaScript switched off. Every fact this page asks you to read is written into the page itself. The Inspect button beside each request only lifts one record out of a long list, and it is not shown at all if scripting is off.
• Sous anglè: Open Brooklyn Community Board 14 and find the section headed Budget requests this district made to city agencies.

Sous anglè: Step 1 — Choose the agency, and keep the choice

Sous anglè: The list is grouped by the agency responsible for answering, because a request only means something next to the agency it was addressed to. Under Choose an agency each name is an ordinary link. Following one opens that agency's group and puts the choice in the page address.

Sous anglè: Choose Department of Transportation. The address now ends in #board-budget-requests-transportation, which is what makes the choice survive: open a request, leave the page, press the browser's Back button, and you return to the same agency with the same list open at the same place.

Sous anglè: Checkpoint: Sous anglè: the Department of Transportation group is open, and the page address ends in board-budget-requests-transportation.

Sous anglè: Step 2 — Read the request

Sous anglè: Find request 214202710C. It has two parts, and they are not the same thing.

• Sous anglè: The heading, Other transportation infrastructure requests, is the category the city files the request under. It is deliberately broad.
• Sous anglè: Underneath it is what the board actually wrote: keep the sidewalks, curbs, street and bus pads maintained at every bus stop, and in particular at Church Avenue and East 18th Street, where the connection to the Church Avenue station is in poor condition in both directions.

Sous anglè: Read the board's own words before the heading. The heading tells you which pile the request went into. The board's words tell you what was asked for.

Sous anglè: Step 3 — Read the priority number, and what it is a priority within

Sous anglè: The same request carries Priority 03 among this board's capital requests to this agency.

Sous anglè: Three things are packed into that. It is *this board's* order, not the city's. It counts only *capital* requests — the ones about building or fixing something, kept apart from expense requests, which pay for running a service. And it counts only requests *to this agency*. A priority 01 to the Department of Transportation and a priority 01 to the Department of Sanitation are two separate first places. Neither is ahead of the other, and there is no citywide queue here at all.

Sous anglè: Step 4 — Read the answers in order

Sous anglè: Below the request are the answers published for it, oldest first. This request has two.

1. Sous anglè: Published May 12, 2026 — sidewalks are the adjacent property owner's responsibility, curb repairs should be sent to the Borough Commissioner, and pedestrian ramps come out of a citywide allocation.
2. Sous anglè: Published June 30, 2026 — the request has already been completed, because the location was resurfaced in Summer 2025.

Sous anglè: CityScroll marks the second one: This answer reads differently from the one published May 12, 2026.

Sous anglè: Read what the later answer actually says. It reports resurfacing at one location. The request was about sidewalks, curbs, street and bus pads at bus stops across the district. An answer that reports one piece of work is not the same as the request being met, and CityScroll does not treat it as one.

Sous anglè: Checkpoint: Sous anglè: you can say what the request asked for, and separately what each dated answer said about it.

Sous anglè: Step 5 — Tell a changed answer from a changed label

Sous anglè: Now open the Department of Youth & Community Development group and find request 214202727E, about the Summer Youth Employment Program. Its two answers are not identical either — the June one opens with "OMB supports the agency's position as follows" and the May one does not — but the note underneath reads:

Sous anglè: Between May 12, 2026 and this publication only the publisher's wrapper sentence changed. The answer itself reads the same.

Sous anglè: That wrapper is a budget-stage label the city adds around the agency's words as the budget moves from one publication to the next. It changes on its own schedule and it is not a civic event. This is the distinction to carry away from this page: the text changed and the answer changed are two different findings, and only the second one is news.

Sous anglè: Checkpoint: Sous anglè: you can point at one request whose answer changed and one whose label changed, and say which is which.

Sous anglè: Step 6 — Look at the same request from the agency's side

Sous anglè: Each request names the agency responsible for answering it, and that name is a link. Following it from a Department of Transportation request opens the agency's own page at Brooklyn Community Board 14's group, so you arrive on the same pair — this board, this agency — rather than on the whole city.

Sous anglè: The agency page states how many community board requests name that agency, and lists every board that asked, in that board's own order. For the full list from one district it links back to that board's page, because the board's list is the one kept in the board's own priority order.

Sous anglè: What this does not tell you

• Sous anglè: A published answer is not money. It is what the responsible agency wrote about the request on that date. It is not funding, not a commitment, and not delivery, and a request with a supportive answer is not a project that exists.
• Sous anglè: There is no score. CityScroll does not total up how often an agency supported or refused requests. The register holds written answers on dates. A percentage would be an invention.
• Sous anglè: A priority number is not a citywide rank. See Step 3.
• Sous anglè: Two requests are two requests. Requests that read alike, or that concern the same street, keep separate rows, separate tracking codes and separate answers. Two neighbouring requests about Newkirk Plaza — 214202725E to the Department of Transportation and 214202735E to the Transit Authority — are answered by different bodies and got different answers.

Sous anglè: When there is nothing to read, and when it could not be read

Sous anglè: Three different things can leave you looking at no requests, and the page says which one has happened rather than showing you an empty space.

• Sous anglè: The register holds nothing for this board. The section says so in a sentence about the register. That is not a record that the board asked for nothing. It is what the copies CityScroll holds contain.
• Sous anglè: The list could not be read. The section says that instead, and points you at the published register so you can go and look yourself. Reload the page to try again. Treat this as a fact about today's read, not about the board.
• Sous anglè: The agency is not one CityScroll has a page for. The group still lists the requests and keeps the name exactly as the city published it, and says why there is no link. A missing page is not a missing agency.

Sous anglè: A request can also be missing something the board never supplied — most often a location. Where that happens the page says the board gave no location, rather than leaving a gap you might read as an address of nowhere.

Sous anglè: Where the records come from

Sous anglè: The requests and answers are published by the New York City Office of Management and Budget in its Register of Community Board Budget Requests. CityScroll keeps a copy of each publication it has read and shows the answers from those copies, so the pages above do not depend on the publisher being reachable when you open them. The section names the publication dates it is reading, and there is a link to the published register at the foot of it.

Sous anglè: You are done when you can read any board's list the same way

Sous anglè: Open your own board from the community board list, find its budget requests, and for one of them say four things out loud: what the board asked for in its own words, which agency has to answer it, what that agency's priority number does and does not rank it against, and what the most recent published answer says. If a change note appears, say whether the answer changed or only the label around it did. That is the whole skill, and it works on any of the 59 districts.