CATS: NYC Boiler and Air Emissions Permit Applications

Clean Air Tracking System (CATS) records permit applications for boilers, engines, generators, and industrial work in New York City. The dataset tracks requests for registration, renewal, inspection, and amendments, linking them to specific buildings and owners. Columns suggest it contains administrative details like application status, issue dates, fuel types, and equipment models.

Use Cases

• Tracking permit application status and timelines using status, RequestType, IssueDate, and ExpirationDate.
• Analyzing fuel types and equipment models across boroughs using PrimaryFuel, SecondaryFuel, Make, Model, BurnerMake, and Borough.
• Linking permits to specific buildings and owners using Bin, Block, Lot, Street, House, PremiseName, and OwnerName.
• Assessing the scale of boiler installations using Quantity and associated RequestID or ApplicationID.

Strengths

• Provides a detailed, operational view of a city's air quality permitting process with over 20 specific columns.
• Cross-platform presence on Socrata and Data.gov indicates official maintenance and public importance.

Limitations

• Critical metadata is missing or conflicting: row count, size, license, and author are not provided.
• The 'last updated' date shows a future date (2026-03-22) on two platforms, indicating a potential metadata error.
• Documentation is limited to a brief description and an external link, with no data dictionary or change log.

Provenance

Source

City of New York, likely the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).

Collection Method

Likely collected via the online Clean Air Tracking System (CATS) application.

Time Range

null

Freshness

Last updated dates are provided but conflict: 2026-03-22 (future date) and 2026-03-18.

Geography

New York City, with Borough column for granularity.