In some New York counties your seat on the county board is your town itself. Those counties are governed by a board of supervisors: each town and each city elects a supervisor to run it, and those same supervisors sit together as the county board. There is no separate county district to be in, and no separate county election — the person you elected to run your town is the person who votes for you at the county.
So the question "who is my county supervisor?" is answered by naming your town or city. This lookup does that from a point on the map, and it grows one county at a time. The counties it answers for are listed further down this page.
Or open the map and pick your location on it:
Find your county supervisor →Opens the map with the county and county supervisor 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 board of any kind. 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 board seat to find and no supervisor 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.
And if your county elects a legislature instead
A New York county is governed in one of three ways. Some elect a county legislature from single districts drawn after each census, and those have their own lookup: who is my county legislator? Some are governed by a board of supervisors, which is this page. Otsego's board of representatives is a third arrangement and its own question.
A county's form is established from the county's own records before a single name is written down here, because the two forms need different things: a legislature needs its districts drawn, and a board of supervisors needs none, since the map already draws every town and city in the state.
What the lookup shows
Select a point in a county this layer covers and the card names the town or city whose seat you are in and the supervisor or supervisors who hold it, with the party, telephone and mailing address wherever that county publishes them. Some counties publish names and nothing else, and the card then shows the name and no contact rows rather than filling them in from somewhere else.
A town or city can hold more than one seat, and the card names everyone who holds one. New York County Law lets a county weight its board so that a larger town sends more than one supervisor — Clifton Park and the city of Saratoga Springs each send two to the Saratoga County board. A card that named one of a pair would be naming half your representation.
County board, town, city, village
Several maps cover the same New York address and answer different questions.
- County board seat — in these counties, your town or city. This page.
- Town — a local government with its own elected supervisor and town board. In a county governed by a board of supervisors, the supervisor you elect to run your town is also your seat on the county board, so the two answers are the same person wearing two hats. The map's City or Town layer names the town itself.
- City — its own local government, outside any town. A city in one of these counties sends a supervisor to the county board just as a town does.
- Village — a village sits inside a town and is a government on top of it, not instead of it. A village does not send a supervisor to the county board; the town around it does, so a village address is answered by its town's seat.
Where the boundaries and the names come from
Nothing new is drawn for this lookup. The shapes are the state's own map of New York's 62 cities and 933 towns, published by its Office of Information Technology Services, which this map already draws for its City or Town layer. Because the county board seat is the town, the map of the seats is the map of the towns, and the same file answers both questions.
The names come from each county's own board of supervisors page, 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.
Two things are checked before any of it ships. The number of supervisors read has to match the number the county's own page says sit on its board, and every town and city in the county has to have a seat. A county that fails either is not published at all, because a board with a town missing from it reads as a board one seat smaller than it is.
One caveat is worth stating plainly. Out on open water — Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, Long Island Sound — a point is in no town and in no city, so there is no county board seat to name. The card says so rather than naming the nearest shore.
Every board of supervisors, county by county
Every New York county whose roster this project has: 4 counties, 78 people, each name published by the county itself.
- Delaware County 19 members
- Saratoga County 23 members
- Schoharie County 16 members
- Warren County 20 members