@betanyc/nys-openlegislation-mcp

An MCP server for the NYS Open Legislation API, maintained by the New York State Senate. Gives AI assistants direct access to the full NYS legislative record — bills, laws, members, committees, calendars, agendas, and transcripts — covering 150,000+ bills and resolutions dating back to 2009.

Built by BetaNYC as part of a suite of civic data MCP servers for New York.

What it covers

API key

A free API key is strongly recommended, and required for live data. Get one from the NYS Open Legislation portal and set it as the NYS_LEGISLATION_API_KEY environment variable:

1. Register at legislation.nysenate.gov/public
2. You'll receive an API key by email
3. Set it as NYS_LEGISLATION_API_KEY (e.g. export NYS_LEGISLATION_API_KEY="your-api-key"), or pass it in your MCP client's env block — see Installation

Without a key, the server still starts as long as a local corpus exists, and serves it in local-only mode. Results are labelled with the corpus sync date and a note saying what refreshes them. The 5 tools with no local coverage (get_bill_votes, get_bill_updates, get_committee_meetings, get_updates, search) return a message naming the key rather than failing opaquely, and a lookup that finds nothing in the corpus says so explicitly — offline, "not in the corpus" and "does not exist" are not the same claim.

The server refuses to start only when both the key and the corpus are missing.

Bill URLs returned by this server point to the public nysenate.gov website — no login required.

Installation

Requires Node.js 20 or newer.

Use with Claude Desktop (recommended)

No global install needed. Add to your Claude Desktop config and npx handles the rest.

Edit ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nys-openlegislation": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@betanyc/nys-openlegislation-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "NYS_LEGISLATION_API_KEY": "your-api-key-here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. The server starts automatically.

Global install

npm install -g @betanyc/nys-openlegislation-mcp

Then in your MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nys-openlegislation": {
      "command": "nys-openlegislation-mcp",
      "env": {
        "NYS_LEGISLATION_API_KEY": "your-api-key-here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Local corpus (optional)

By default the server queries the live NYS Open Legislation API on every request. If you run large workloads — bulk research, repeated searches, or offline use — you can build a local SQLite corpus that the server queries first, falling back to the API only on a cache miss.

The corpus is also what makes the server usable without an API key: with a corpus present and no key, it starts in local-only mode instead of exiting. Building the corpus in the first place does require a key (npm run sync calls the live API), so this is a "borrow a colleague's corpus" or "key expired" path, not a way

... View full README on GitHub