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TESTIMONY
Testimony by Council Member Julie Won on contracting failures and land use challenges
1:01:00
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11 min
Council Member Julie Won, Chair of the Committee on Contracts, testifies on the dire situation of nonprofits facing non-payment, advocating for MOCS to become a charter agency and detailing severe issues with the PASSPort system including outdated technology, lack of resources, and user-unfriendliness. She then addresses land use, highlighting Long Island City's rapid growth and the need for fair share distribution of shelters and other facilities, calling for comprehensive planning while preserving the City Council's role in negotiating community benefits and infrastructure. Won criticizes agency inflexibility regarding the use of public land for public good.
- Non-payment severely harms nonprofits, especially smaller minority-led groups, risking closures.
- MOCS should be a charter agency; PASSPort needs major investment and overhaul (technology, staffing, standardization, usability, language access).
- Fair Share principles must apply to shelters and other facilities, ending concentration in low-income areas.
- Supports housing density but emphasizes the need for comprehensive neighborhood planning (integrating infrastructure) and retaining Council negotiation power (ULURP).
- City agencies should not have sole discretion over public land use when opportunities exist for public benefit (e.g., green space, FAR sales).
Julie Won
1:01:00
Good evening, everyone.
1:01:02
Welcome to my neighborhood.
1:01:03
So my name is Julie Wan.
1:01:05
I'm currently the council member representing Law Island City where we're sitting as well as Sunnyside, Woodside, and Historic.
1:01:11
But I come to you I come before you this really sound day mission for two reasons.
1:01:17
I'm coming here as a council member to speak about land use as well as the chair of contracts for all the reasons that you've heard.
1:01:25
Since I've taken office in 2021 2022, it's clear to me that none of our nonprofits are getting paid, and all the stories are the same.
1:01:36
They are struggling to make ends meet.
1:01:38
We have seen, especially the black and brown smaller nonprofits suffer the most where we are at the risk of closing them down completely because they've not been paid in the last three years.
1:01:49
And they are doing extremely important work.
1:01:50
Their workers have been furloughed, yet they are still doing crisis response for cure violence in a high risk area like Queensbridge houses to do gun response when there's a shooting with no guns, with no life vest, no bulletproof vest, but they always show up whether it's 4AM or 6AM.
1:02:07
And our city relies on them, but they are not getting paid.
1:02:11
If this wasn't any other sector outside of the government, you would have gone into collections, and you would not be here anymore.
1:02:17
The amount of debt that we would be in, it is un it is unbelievable.
1:02:22
For all of our human services workers that are doing the work for our communities, they deserve to get paid, and the mayor's office of contracts should be a chartered agency like OMB.
1:02:34
It has to be.
1:02:35
Because what I'm seeing firsthand the last three years as a chair of contracts is that we have a a slew of issues.
1:02:41
We are under resourced for the technology itself.
1:02:45
Passport is outdated already.
1:02:48
The user experience is crummy.
1:02:50
For me as a chair of contracts, when I'm seeing reports of corruption or a need for accountability, it takes seventy two hours for me to get a compliance report from Microsoft DOS.
1:03:02
How are we gonna keep anybody accountable if our software itself is so readily updated?
1:03:07
And because of the complexity of the processes and the agencies, we can't have an out of the box system where you could just purchase software and think, well, this works for other companies.
1:03:15
Let's just open it here.
1:03:17
No.
1:03:17
We're going to have to personalize it.
1:03:19
We're gonna have to customize it, and it's going to take a lot of money and a lot of work, but we have not put in the resources to invest in the sole system that we are relying on to digitize what has once been a paper based as well as a siloed independent individualized system.
1:03:34
We have to come to a place where we have standardized and processes itself across all agencies, even with agencies like DOE DOE and H and H that we have not been able to get contracts for because they don't go through the cities.
1:03:46
They are in
Louisa Chafee
1:03:47
a city agency, and they
Julie Won
1:03:48
don't go through the same contract thing process.
1:03:51
Yet we've invested millions of dollars in these emergency city contracts, for example, for the migrant crisis.
1:03:57
But we don't have the curfew over them as we would for others other city agency contracts.
1:04:02
In addition to the technology itself, we also are doing a disservice by investing what we have in the millions for passport, yet we have paid ourselves quality assurance to the same person to do quality assurance.
1:04:15
Can you imagine if you, as an employer, can tell me, Julie, why don't you evaluate the quality of your work on about yourself?
1:04:22
That is never how it works in technology.
1:04:24
I spent ten years before this working for
Louisa Chafee
1:04:26
a very large tech company as
Julie Won
1:04:27
a federal contractor.
1:04:28
Some of the practices that we are doing is a disgrace and is a disservice to the public, and it is no surprise that as much as Passport is trying its best, that we are far, far beyond behind what we should be in 2025.
1:04:42
In addition to the technology itself, we are finally we are finally working on something that's called document vault.
1:04:49
So one of the woes that some of the contractors have is that you have to upload the same document multiple times for every single agency if you're doing business.
1:04:57
And we still have a standardized simple things like insurance premiums for you to do business with the city.
1:05:03
If you are a nonprofit that services CHF as well as a as well as DCLA, then you better have all of your insurance premiums that's going
Louisa Chafee
1:05:11
to cost you an arm and a leg so that you can provide a service to
Diane Savino
1:05:14
the city because we haven't figured out how to speak
Julie Won
1:05:16
to each other on standardizing our processes, our systems to make it easier for them.
1:05:22
But now we finally have a centralized place where you upload your document once, but now we're also looking at how we create a system with our state partners so that you're not uploading it more than a few times with the city and the state.
1:05:35
In addition to that, we just don't have enough bodies and resources.
1:05:39
The pegs that mobs have seen has been horrendous.
1:05:43
We are fighting for being barely about 10 people every single year baseline.
1:05:47
And the mayor's office of nonprofits was abysmal.
1:05:50
The last two years that I've been in office, there was one person and maybe one and a half.
1:05:53
And now we're trying to get more people in the job, but we need to actually have support for these nonprofits to be able to do business with the city.
1:06:02
And the user experience itself is extremely hard to understand.
1:06:06
It is not it's not it if you put Gen Z in front of it, they would cry because it is so nonintuitive.
1:06:14
You look at it and be like, what is this artifact?
1:06:17
It's it's not okay.
1:06:19
But in addition to that, for our nonprofits, if you are a nonprofit that services a certain cultural language based community,
Diane Savino
1:06:29
good luck because you're only doing it in English.
Julie Won
1:06:32
A procurement language in itself, unless you come from a background and you understand supply chain, you are not looking up these acronyms and trying to figure out in your own home language.
1:06:41
Let me see what this is in Chinese.
1:06:43
Oh, no.
1:06:45
No translation exists in Google.
1:06:47
So you have already created barriers for the people that need to service the
Louisa Chafee
1:06:50
most vulnerable communities to be able
Julie Won
1:06:52
to access them.
1:06:53
So we need to we need to invest in the system of contracting itself, and we need to keep ourselves accountable by allowing them to allowing ourselves to have interest payments of what is owed because these people are taking out loans.
1:07:10
And I've had conversations with local museum of my districts, local nonprofits, schools like this, LaGuardia, which is right next door.
1:07:18
Those people are taking out loans with high interest rates themselves, begging for you to pay them back in at least five years' time.
1:07:26
Okay.
1:07:27
Putting that aside, and I'm happy to talk more from a technology perspective, from a process perspective, from the PPP perspective, from procurement law pools perspective, but for land use.
1:07:37
Where we're sitting right now, Long Island City has seen 40 growth more than the city itself.
1:07:45
We have grown six times the rate of how fast New York City is growing in terms of density.
1:07:51
That is all been great.
1:07:53
And during the during the first two years of my op that I've been in office, I have never been against density, and I have always accepted more and more populations.
1:08:02
We have we opened the highest amount of shelters in the whole entire city for migrants, so we have 38 shelters collectively that amounted to more than 18,000 people being homeless in this district once the thirty sixty day rule has been passed where that policy was rolled out.
1:08:17
That means mostly West African migrants were sleeping in tents, were sleeping in my parks, were sleeping in our community garden because they have nowhere to go.
1:08:24
We need to build housing.
1:08:26
But what we've seen from City of Yes and what we've seen from even the shelter conversation, some of our neighbors cannot accept the fact that they have to do their fair share of opening a shelter.
1:08:39
This needs to be a charter revision where we say that no matter who you are, no matter how wealthy you are, no matter how white you are, you need to do your fair share and open up shelters, equal distribution throughout the whole entire city in 51 council districts.
1:08:55
No buts or ifs.
1:08:56
And just because you try and scream and you go on national TV, find bloody murder, asking for mass deportations, it does not matter.
1:09:04
Everyone needs to have pro based jails, shelters, supportive housing.
1:09:11
We need to make sure that we have equal distribution for the health of our city.
1:09:16
In addition to that, what we're seeing is that people don't want to see shadows in their neighborhood.
1:09:23
And I understand change is scary, but we are in a housing crisis nationally
Dr. Lisette Nieves
1:09:29
as well as in
Julie Won
1:09:29
the city, and we have to walk a fine line of not taking away powers from council.
1:09:33
Because if you look at a project like Innovation Queens, I was only able to negotiate to have 40% affordable 5% affordable housing on a private land with a very high value market because we were able to leverage the powers of the city council to negotiate that.
1:09:51
That was historical.
1:09:53
So we need to make sure that there is some sort of fine line where we say, hey.
1:09:57
You have to do your fair share.
1:10:00
Every single council district has to meet a threshold of x percent, and maybe we do it by ratio of population growth or a forecast of population growth that we want to meet to make sure that we are holding them accountable, but we still have to allow them to negotiate because no one knows their community better than the council members, where I know from the back of my hand what purse what percentage growth I'm expecting for my three k classes pre k classes, what my birth rate was for my local hospitals, and what schools I'm going to need for which areas of my neighborhoods, and where I'm gonna need a new park, where I'm going to need a new library, and what my people are asking for.
1:10:36
So these negotiations can only happen in a way that the community won't be up in arms in a way that people did not want a subsidy of yes as a blanket conversation, but working with the council to make sure that we are meeting a minimum threshold of saying we have
Diane Savino
1:10:51
to build because we have
Julie Won
1:10:52
a housing crisis, but here's how we're gonna get there.
1:10:55
And I am a huge proponent of comprehensive planning, so that means neighborhood rezonings are essential to get our social infrastructure in, our public infrastructure in, as well as getting private developers to develop in a quick period of time.
1:11:10
So I look forward to working with you.
1:11:12
And one last thing I wanna ask is for publicly owned land.
1:11:16
For example, underneath the Queensborough Bridge, there is massive amounts of parking space.
1:11:22
There's parking and storage.
1:11:24
Some are just empty underneath the BQE ramps.
1:11:27
Just empty.
1:11:28
Yet we have no park space.
1:11:29
We have no green space.
1:11:31
And the agencies have this ability to say, no.
1:11:34
I need this for parking or I need this for storage.
1:11:37
It should not be that way.
1:11:38
The charter should mandate that the mayor or the council have the ability to solely decide how public land is used, especially if it's gonna be for public good, like green space or selling the FAR to build more density.
1:11:52
Because I have been dealing for more than a year now with DOT asking them to write an RFP because I have so many developers who wanna develop and take the the buy FAR.
1:12:01
We would be purchasing it with millions of dollars, and DOT say, no.
1:12:05
No.
1:12:05
No.
1:12:05
No.
1:12:05
I'm not giving up any land for anything even if it's not for development.
1:12:10
Just to sell your FAR.
1:12:11
They're refusing.
1:12:11
That should not be okay in
Louisa Chafee
1:12:13
a in a time like now.
1:12:15
Thank you.