The City Council is meeting today to discuss a bill that would confine horse drawn carriages to Central Park. 

The bill calls for reducing the number of horses over time and building them a stable inside Central Park by 2018.

Mayor Bill de Blasio had been pushing for an outright ban on the horses after getting campaign money from an animal rights group.

He calls the bill a compromise.

Protesters who gathered outside City Hall on Thursday did not feel the same way.

Some say anything short of a complete ban is cruel to the horses.

Others say the city is breaking the law by turning part of Central Park over to the horses.

"We were promised a ban by Mayor de Blasio - he ran on that as a campaign issue. So this is all very shocking," said Edita Birnkrant of Friends of Animals.

"The mayor is trying to use public parkland to settle a political debt. He could not get his original bill passed, and now he's trying to use public parkland in a landmark park - he's trying to give that to a private industry. And that's not a park use," said Geoffrey Croft of NYC Park Advocates.

It's not yet clear when the City Council will vote on the bill.