Failing to curb your dog is illegal, and violators face a $250 fine, but the fine does little to change behavior. Recognizing this, the city council recently passed a three-law package known as the Safe and Clean Outdoor Ownership Practices (SCOOP) Act.

Government officials agree change is necessary. A representative from the Sanitation Department testified that enforcement officers would have to catch the owner while leaving a pile behind, which is unlikely to happen. They even tried special patrols in areas with high 311 requests for dog waste, but these have resulted in no fines.

“The chances of someone not picking up after their dog while an enforcement officer is watching is very, very slim,” the representative said. “It is clear that people only leave piles behind when they know no one is watching.”

With nobody to hold accountable, law enforcement has struggled to forge the best path forward. In other communities they have required owners to register their dogs’ DNA, to then swab any droppings and fine the owner. But a system that’s administratively plausible in an apartment complex, bounded community, or even a smaller city is a very different proposition across New York City, not to mention the obvious privacy and political questions created by building a DNA registry of people’s pets. Absent a radically more intensive enforcement system, the Council is trying to intervene elsewhere in the behavioral chain.

What actually causes the poop?

The SCOOP Act treats dog waste on the street as an outcome with multiple possible causes. The same problem can produce completely different solutions depending on how you explain what's causing it.

Maybe the problem is that dog walkers don’t have bags. Or a dog pooped twice and the walker already used their bag. Or the dog walker just doesn’t care. By diagnosing the behavior resulting in the dog poop, laws are able to address these specific cases.

Can you educate people into picking it up?

The first law in the SCOOP Act, Intro 0872, mandates the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) to conduct a three-year long outreach campaign, teaching the public why it’s important to remove dog waste. They will report on its effectiveness after the third year.1

You might assume everyone knows leaving waste behind is wrong. The DSNY agrees, testifying that: “Every dog owner knows what they are supposed to do in consideration of their neighbors. They should do the right thing and pick up after their dogs.” Also adding that they have “done and continue to do several ad campaigns and educational outreach on the issue of dog waste.”

This prompts multiple questions. First, if the relevant agency is already taking action, why pass a law requiring them to do what they already are doing? Maybe it’s to ensure they take action instead of just leaving it up to administrative discretion. But, if the agency reveals doubt that lack of awareness is the problem, why would another education campaign be expected to change behavior?

The package’s next law makes this question even more interesting.

What if people just need a bag?

Intro 0857-2026 tackles a different potential reason why a dog walker might not pick up after their dog: not having a dog bag when they need one. It addresses this by mandating the city to provide free public dog waste bags. This makes sense at first, if you want to pick up after your dog but realize you don’t have a bag, a bag would solve the problem.

So, where will these bags be? The bill requires DSNY to “install no less than 1,200 dog waste bag dispensers on public litter baskets across the 5 boroughs.” But imagine this: your dog poops halfway down a block and you realize you don’t have a bag. The nearest dispenser is on a litter basket somewhere else. How far out of your way are you willing to walk to get one? And will you come back? The effectiveness of the intervention depends partly on distance, but we don’t yet know the behavioral relationship between distance and uptake.

The law is built on a behavioral hypothesis: in this case that making bags available will meaningfully increase pickup. However, it is the city council deciding that this hypothesis should be tested.

Who should design the solution?

We’ve now seen the Council mandate two different behavioral interventions: education and access to bags. This raises a broader question: how much should a legislature specify the intervention it wants tested, and how much should it specify the outcome and leave the intervention to the agency?

There are real advantages to legislative specificity. Legislators are accountable to voters, and legislation can guarantee that an issue receives attention and that the government takes concrete action. Instead of sending a problem into another round of planning, working groups and reports, the Council can require someone to actually do something.

But there is a tradeoff. Requiring a specific action means choosing an intervention before the implementing agency has had much room to experiment with interventions. Giving agencies more discretion creates room for staff with subject-matter expertise and implementation experience to test, adapt, and learn, but it also makes it harder for elected officials to guarantee that anything happens at all.

The Council does sometimes take this more outcome-oriented approach. Int 1065-2023, for example, mandated an Urban Forest Master Plan for achieving 30% tree canopy by 2050 rather than prescribing every intervention needed to get there. The difficult question is how much of the “what” and “how” should belong to each institution.

In practice, though, legislative specificity and administrative discretion aren’t binary. The dog-bag law demonstrates this. The Council chose the intervention and its scale, at least 1,200 dispensers, but left DSNY to prioritize them in areas with the greatest need for dog-waste mitigation. The law then requires an evaluation after several years.

The broader question is which decisions should be made by elected legislators, which should be left to the agencies implementing the policy, and how much room those agencies should have to learn and adapt.

From behavior to operations

The first two laws try to change what dog owners do. Intro 0864-2026 instead asks what we can do with the waste once someone actually picks it up? It’s answer: compost it.

Yes, the waste we’ve so far treated as a public nuisance can have value if collected properly. But, where could dog waste be collected at scale? Luckily there are places in the city where dogs congregate and collection would be possible… dog runs (aka dog parks)! Who will actually run this dog poop collection operation? The law creates “a pilot program to designate any dog run group with experience in managing dog runs to collect dog feces at any dog run for the purpose of composting.” This law cleverly uses volunteering maintenance networks, but only for certain tasks. The legislation specifically states that “when requested by such dog run groups, the commissioner of parks and recreation shall provide and install such equipment and provide any training on the usage of such equipment” and that the dog runs group must consult the parks commissioner on the implementation of and advertising of dog-waste composting.

Taken together, this third-law allows the city to create a framework to compost dog waste around the city without having to pay for the operations. However, to the extent that this is meant to test the feasibility of citywide dog composting, there is a limitation to what the pilot will be able to tell us. A successful pilot among unusually organized dog-run groups may show that the model can work, without showing that it can be replicated across ordinary dog runs citywide. The eventual report must address efficacy, implementation challenges and potential expansion, so scalability will be considered after the pilot.

What dog poop can teach us about policy

As we can see, there is not an easy bandaid for the dog poop problem.

However, from a Human-Centered Design perspective, what’s striking looking at the solutions people try, is how much depends on the diagnosis that comes before the intervention. If we assume people leave dog poop because they lack bags, we build dispensers. If we assume they lack information, we design campaigns. If we assume they don’t fear consequences, we increase enforcement.

The quality of an intervention depends first on whether we understand the behavior producing the problem. Then, the government also has to decide who should design the response, who should operate it, and how we will know whether it worked.

The next time you walk past a new sign, trash can, bollard, bike lane, public-awareness campaign, etc. ask yourself: What behavior is this trying to change? What assumption about people is built into it? And who decided this was the intervention to try?

For short form content on this topic, check out my instagram, TikTok, or YouTube shorts.

Commissioner Kathy Wylde, the former CEO of the Partnership for New York City, responded with a different question: Isn’t the point of this commission to reduce the hurdles on agencies so we don’t have to rely on quasi-governmental entities like the SCA to deliver capital projects?

This exchange captures a debate that has followed public authorities for more than a century: when the government struggles to deliver, should we create institutions that operate outside traditional governmental constraints, or try to reform those constraints themselves?

On the evening of June 9, 2026, around 100 advocates, members of the press, and civics nerds (hi) piled into a large conference room at New York Law School for the first hearing of Mayor Mamdani’s new Charter Revision Commission: the Charter On Government Efficiency (COGE). Cheeky name aside, COGE was established to review the New York City charter -- our city’s governing document -- to “develop proposals to modernize City government, improve service delivery, and strengthen accountability to New Yorkers.” They will do this by traveling the city and holding public hearings and then deliberating. The resulting proposals for changes to the city charter will likely end up on our November ballots.

In this windowless room, two people at a time were called up to testify before the commission. Over the course of the evening, testimony ranged from procurement reform and the Mayor’s Management Report to open primaries and civil service changes.

Several days earlier on a beautiful early summer morning, I opened Gail Radford’s book “The Rise of the Public Authority” in preparation for starting a job at the New York City School Construction Authority later this month.

Public authorities are entities that exist outside the traditional channels of executive control and legislative appropriation. When you take the subway or fly out of one of NY’s 3 airports you are interacting with public authorities: the MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ), respectively. While the public most often interacts with authorities through public transportation, they can also do construction (NYC School Construction Authority, NYS Dorimtory Authority) and support economic development (Empire State Development Corporation), among other miscellaneous goals.

So why do we have public authorities? The common conception is that they exist because they deliver services more efficiently than a traditional government agency can, as they are allowed to be run like a business, often with non-partisan experts appointed to their boards. They also have the added strength of being able to generate revenue (as opposed to being appropriated funding from general tax funds), allowing them to escape political unpredictability and even raise capital by issuing revenue bonds, backed by the authorities’ revenue streams.

Radford argues that we are mistaken in this understanding of why they exist. She argues that when we look to history, we will find that public authorities were not created because agencies are inherently incapable of delivering services efficiency, but instead because progressive policy makers interested in doing more for the public good (often in ways that were often overwhelmingly popular with voting public), were left with no choice but to look outside of the government to develop structures to more effectively deliver services and infrastructure projects given constraints on agencies placed by city charters, state legislation, and the courts.

One such recurring problem was debt limits. New York governments often wanted to build infrastructure but faced constitutional or statutory restrictions on how much debt they could issue directly. Authorities provided a workaround: because they were legally separate entities, they could borrow money and finance projects without those obligations appearing on government balance sheets in the same way. What looks today like an administrative choice was often a response to legal and financial constraints.

Authorities also frequently escaped procurement, civil service, and approval processes that legislators had created to prevent corruption but which reformers increasingly viewed as barriers to building infrastructure at the speed they desired.

However, as Radford writes, “despite the appeal of authorities, the choice to build government capacity using what is essentially a strategy of circumvention comes with real costs. Chief among these is fragmentation of governance power, undermining the ability of elected officials to chart broad policy directions to promote balanced development and greater equality -- goals that the private sector is frequently incapable of achieving on its own.”

Back in the drabby room at New York Law School, when Gale Brewer asked how we could make the Department of Design and Construction (DDC) more similar to the School Construction Authority (SCA) in its ability to deliver capital projects effectively, we can understand that she is looking for ways past the constraints of government agencies to deliver more for the public.

Kathy Wylde’s response encapsulates the other side of the coin. Brewer’s question assumes that the SCA’s effectiveness stems from features unique to the authority model. Wylde’s response asks whether those features are unique to authorities, or are instead just freedoms that government agencies have been denied. We’ve spent decades building workarounds. Should charter reform focus on creating more workarounds, or should it remove the conditions that made them necessary?1

The exchange was particularly striking to me because in a few weeks I will begin work at the School Construction Authority itself. Before opening Radford’s book, I mostly thought of authorities in terms of what they do differently. After attending the hearing, I’m increasingly interested in what successful authorities reveal about the governmental systems they were created to work around.

Radford’s answer is that authorities emerged not because reformers disliked government, but because they were trying to accomplish things that existing governmental structures struggled to deliver. Faced with legal, institutional, and financial obstacles, many chose to work around them rather than confront them directly.

Or, as Mayor Ed Koch reportedly put it: “Authorities are the path of least resistance.”2

The question that COGE should be asking is what successful authorities reveal about where charter changes can improve efficiency.

Yesterday, March 22nd, I attended the first “Data Docs” series held as a part of NYC Open Data Week. After 7 hours of documentaries and Q&As, I walked away confident in the role that documentaries play in exploring the tapestry that is our city.

Of the three films I watched, each explored a different thread, and in doing so highlighted something about the city itself. They show the depth of human experience that lies beyond simple analytical policy discussions.

Changing Lanes

Dir. Ben Wolf, 2025, 75 min

www.changinglanesdoc.com/

This documentary followed the contentious story Mcguiness Boulevard street redesign, a community led movement to have a “road diet” on a notoriously dangerous road in Greenpoint. There was high quality footage from extremely heated community meetings that would surprise the unitiatiated with their intensity. This documentary was a love letter to and time capsule of 2020s NYC urbanism.

It tackled topics such as the physical environment, urbanism, biking, and theories of social change through the built environment. There were many times when things said by David Byrnes (who I was surprised to learn is such an avid urban biker), Janette Sadik-Khan and others could have been quoted directly from essays I am currently working on.

Synthesis: Infrastructure, because it is always embedded with values, reflects competing beliefs about what a city should be. This means ideologically charged political warfare can ensue over what might seem like a small physical object.

Through The Night

Dir. Loira Limbal, 2021, 76 mins

www.throughthenightdocumentary.com/

This documentary welcomed us into the world of home-based childcare provider Deloris “NuNu” Hogan and her business “Dee’s Tots Daycare” in New Rochelle. It heartwarmingly and heartbreakingly highlighted the hard, and often invisible, work and dedication that working mothers put into their communities, as well as the difficulty of working mothers to get by.

In the current New York discourse, this shows an extremely successful home-based child care business at a time when New York State has to figure out what Universal Child Care will look like. This beautiful documentary shows us the potential of home-based child care to create not just a community but a home for children while their parents work.

Synthesis: Essential social systems often rely on compassionate human labor that we overlook when we zoom out. Despite being deeply necessary and often socially valued, it is under-supported structurally.

Emergent City

Jay Arthur Sterrenberg, Kelly Anderson, 2024, 95 mins

www.emergentcitydoc.com/

For others passionate about NYC land use systems, this was a uniquely fleshed out look at the failed rezoning of Industry City in Sunset Park.

As someone who reads, goes to events, and listens to podcasts to understand the full sides of an issue, this documentary provided something I did not realize I could get: a multi-lens, multi-stakeholder inside look at the motivations, complications, and conflicts of a city rezoning. If anything, it could have been longer and encompassed more sides of the issue, implications, and situated itself in the larger context of NYC land use, however that is not to be expected from a 90 minute documentary.

Full of insider conversations I am surprised we have the chance to hear, this documentary remained mostly impartial and did not attempt to give a clean black and white answer. We are able to sympathize with all the stakeholders and dfiferent moments, and most importantly gain context and experience that we can bring to other conversations in the future. This documentary immortalized a specific attempted rezoning as a case study of how local politics works to be studied by future generations. It was also beautiful visually.

Synthesis: When engaging the diverse stakeholders involved in a single geographical place, understandable conflict ensues as structural, career, and ideological incentives are pitted against one another.

Conclusion

All three films show that the fabric that makes up our city is woven by human experience, despite being organized by overlapping institutions and structures. This human tapestry can be easy to miss if we don’t look closely. Documentaries offer a unique way to follow these threads more closely and flesh out a mental model of how they are stitched together.

I will definitely attend events like this in the future. Many thanks to those who hosted it as well as the documentarians.