A New York county is governed in one of three ways, and only one of them elects anybody from a district. Where a county has a county legislature, each legislator is elected from a single district, and that district is a shape this map can draw and answer for. Where a county has a board of supervisors, the members are the towns' own supervisors sitting on the county board because they were elected to run their towns — there is no county district to be in. Otsego's board of representatives is a third arrangement and its own question.
So this lookup grows one county at a time, and the county's form is established from the county's own records before a single name is written down. The counties it answers for are listed further down this page.
Or open the map and pick your location on it:
Find your county legislature district →Opens the map with the county and county legislature layers on. Search your address or ZIP, or tap your location.
If you are in New York City, this is not your lookup
The five boroughs are also five counties — Bronx, Kings, New York, Queens and Richmond — and none of them has a county legislature. The city absorbed their county governments, and the Board of Estimate, which had been the nearest equivalent, was struck down by the Supreme Court in Board of Estimate of City of New York v. Morris (1989) and never replaced. There is no county-level district to find and no county legislator to name, so the map hides this layer inside the city rather than showing an empty card.
What answers for a city address instead is the City Council district, and below it the community board.
What the lookup shows
Select a point in a county this layer covers and the card names the district, the legislator who holds it, their party, the committees they sit on, and a way to reach them — an e-mail, and a telephone number where the county publishes one for that member rather than for the body. It links the legislator's own page on the county's site where there is one.
Where a county publishes one telephone number against every member, that number is the legislature's switchboard and belongs to no one member, so it is shown once as the body's number and against nobody. A member the county gives no direct line for has no telephone row at all, rather than the switchboard's.
County legislature, town, city, village
Several maps cover the same New York address and answer different questions.
- County legislature district — one seat on the county legislature, redrawn after each decennial census.
- Town — a local government with its own elected supervisor and town board. In a county governed by a board of supervisors, your town supervisor is also your seat on the county board. The map's Town or City layer names yours.
- City — its own local government, outside any town.
- Village — a village sits inside a town and is a government on top of it, not instead of it, so both apply to the same address.
Where the boundaries and the names come from
The district shapes come from each county's own GIS office, and the names from the pages that county maintains about its own legislature — a member list and, where the county publishes one, a contact sheet. Both are re-read every week, and a change lands as a reviewed pull request rather than appearing on the card unseen. Every source is named on the sources & data layers page.
Where a county's district layer also carries a member's name, that column is read and compared and never published. A name column in a boundary file is a snapshot of whoever held the seat when the file was drawn, and this project has measured one elsewhere that got half a board wrong; the county's own member page is what it maintains as people, so that is what the card shows. The comparison runs weekly and reports a disagreement rather than shipping it.
One caveat is worth stating plainly. The state and each county draw the same county boundary independently, and the two drawings differ by a few metres along it. In that sliver a point can fall inside the county and inside no district, or inside a district and outside the county. Nothing is snapped to hide it: the card says it cannot place the point rather than guessing which district a reader on the line belongs to.
Every county legislature, county by county
Every New York county whose roster this project has: 1 counties, 16 people, each name published by the county itself.
- Tompkins County 16 members