What New York municipal websites have to carry
New York added a municipal website law, then amended it before it took effect. The amendment added a population threshold that a lot of summaries still leave out, and it changes who the law reaches. Here is an orientation to it, with the sources, so you can take the actual text to your own attorney.
This is an orientation, not legal advice and not an opinion about your municipality’s obligations. Your municipal attorney and the State of New York are the only authorities on what your municipality must do.
The short version
Two chapters matter, and the second one changed the first.
- Chapter 609 of the Laws of 2024, signed December 21, 2024, added a new municipal-website section to the General Municipal Law and amended its financial-posting provision. As originally written it applied to all municipal corporations, with no population floor.
- Chapter 97 of the Laws of 2025, signed February 28, 2025, amended Chapter 609 before it ever took effect. The amendment introduced a population threshold.
As amended, the obligation to maintain an official “.gov” website applies to municipal corporations with a population of 1,500 or more. Municipalities under that threshold are not released from the section — more on that below, because it is the part most often reported incorrectly.
A word about effective dates
Published accounts of when this took effect conflict with one another, which is why two summaries of the same law may not agree.
The original chapter carried one date, which was superseded before it arrived. The amending chapter is written in terms of a period after signing, and sources differ on which signing it refers to. As far as we can establish, no New York State agency has published a specific calendar date in words.
What is not in dispute is that every candidate date has now passed, so for practical purposes the requirement is current. If the precise date matters to you — because something turns on it — that is a question for your attorney against the enacted text, not something to take from any summary, including this one.
Who counts as a “municipal corporation”
This is the question that decides whether the section reaches you at all, and the answer is narrower than people expect. In the General Municipal Law, “municipal corporation” includes only a county, town, city and village.
A hamlet is not a municipal corporation. Neither is a census-designated place. Those are names on a map, not governments, and they have no board, no clerk and no duty here — the obligation sits with the town, village, city or county that contains them, subject to the threshold.
So for a place like Adams Center, there is nothing for “Adams Center” to do. The question is what the Town of Adams does.
What the section calls for
Grouped the way a clerk would actually think about it, the website is to carry:
- Basic information about the municipality — including hours of operation, elected officials and services provided.
- A privacy policy, prominently posted and in plain language, disclosing what personal information is collected and how it is used.
- Financial documents under the General Municipal Law’s financial-posting provision — the most recent annual financial reports, the current year’s budget, the most recent independent audit report, and the most recent fiscal performance or multiyear financial plan — except where a FOIL exemption applies.
- Notice of municipal elections, public hearings and public meetings, including regular board or legislative meetings.
- Agendas and minutes of municipal meetings as required by Article 7 of the Public Officers Law.
- Codes, local laws and resolutions — either an up-to-date version, or an active hyperlink to one. The hyperlink option is expressly in the statute, which matters for a town whose code lives on a third-party code service.
Two phrases the statute leaves undefined
The statute contains phrases that are undefined, and the honest answer about them is that they are undefined.
For municipalities under the threshold, the text says they “shall comply with the provisions of this section to the extent practicable.” That phrase is not defined in the section, and we are not aware of agency guidance or case law construing it. Note what it is not: it is not an exemption. A small village is not outside the section — it is held to a standard nobody has yet drawn a line around.
The same caution applies to the instruction to “update such website regularly.” There is no stated interval. Anyone converting either phrase into a page count, a checklist or an update schedule is supplying a number the law does not contain.
The shared-domain option
A small municipality without its own “.gov” domain is not necessarily stuck. The law provides that a municipal corporation hosting its official website on another municipal corporation’s “.gov” URL is treated as meeting the requirement to maintain an official website with a “.gov” domain name.
The limit is the whole substance of the provision: the host has to be another municipal corporation. A county hosting a town is the shape this contemplates. A commercial domain is not.
Towncrier is not your “.gov” site, and will not pretend to be
We would rather say this plainly on the page than have you work it out later.
Towncrier is not a “.gov” domain and is not your municipality’s official website. The only route the law provides for meeting the “.gov” requirement without your own domain is hosting on another municipal corporation’s “.gov” URL, and a commercial platform is not that. Nothing you post through Towncrier discharges what the state asks of your own website, and a vendor who tells you otherwise is putting your notices at risk of challenge rather than protecting you.
What Towncrier is actually for is narrower and more practical: getting notices, agendas and minutes published promptly, in a place residents can follow, without a clerk rebuilding a PDF page every week. Several of the document types on the list above are things a town has to keep publishing anyway, and the cadence is where small offices struggle. That is a real problem and it is the one we work on. It is a different thing from what the state asks of your own website, and we will not blur the two.
One thing the Open Meetings Law does not require
This one surprises people, including officials: the Open Meetings Law does not require a public body to create or follow an agenda. The Committee on Open Government has put it directly — the law does not require public bodies, including municipalities, to create or follow agendas, while the Open Meetings Law does require public bodies to produce minutes.
Most boards keep agendas anyway, for the obvious practical reasons. But the duty that bites is minutes, not agendas.
Where to read it yourself
Everything above is drawn from primary sources, which are listed here so the text can be read directly rather than through a summary.
- The enacted text — the General Municipal Law’s municipal-website and financial-posting provisions, as added and amended by Chapter 609 of the Laws of 2024 and Chapter 97 of the Laws of 2025. Bill text is published by the New York State Senate.
- The Committee on Open Government, at opengovernment.ny.gov, which has published a memo on the municipal posting requirements. The dated update block at the top carries the current text; the superseded original is retained further down the same document and still describes the repealed scope.
- The Office of the State Comptroller, whose Information for Town Officials is reissued annually and states the current requirement compactly.
- A municipality’s own attorney, which is where questions about a particular municipality’s obligations are answered.
Tell us about your municipality
This goes to a person, not a queue. Someone will be in touch shortly to talk it through and send a quote.
Already set up? Sign in to the clerk portal