Your guide to NYC's public proceedings.
PRESENTATION
Alec Schierenbeck on improving city contract payments, climate infrastructure, and digitizing the city map
0:26:52
·
4 min
Executive Director Alec Schierenbeck discusses the chronic issue of delayed payments to city nonprofits and vendors, and challenges in implementing climate infrastructure projects.
He outlines proposals to streamline contract payments, adapt land use procedures for climate resilience, and modernize city operations by creating a single, digitized city map.
These reforms aim to improve government efficiency and responsiveness to critical needs.
- Proposed procurement reforms include empowering the Mayor's Office of Contract Services (MOCS), changing Procurement Policy Board (PPB) rules, and streamlining discretionary contracts.
- Current land use procedures can impede essential climate projects like street raising for flood protection and scaling electric vehicle infrastructure.
- Centralizing and digitizing the city's map, currently spread across 8,000 paper documents, could significantly speed up development and administrative processes.
Alec Schierenbeck
0:26:52
Another problem we have heard much about is that the city, although it relies on nonprofits and other vendors to deliver very critical city services, does a very poor job of paying them on time.
0:27:03
Now this is not a problem unique to this moment or this administration.
0:27:09
It is a problem that goes back quite a bit of time.
0:27:12
As far back as the Koch administration, there are reports you could read today, and it looks like mad libs, about the problems we we we continue to see.
0:27:21
And when you have a problem that's persisted for so long across so many administrations, you start to wonder whether maybe there is a structural component to the issue.
0:27:29
We have heard various ideas for potential structural reforms to make it easier for the city to register contracts and to timely pay vendors.
0:27:39
One would be to elevate and power the mayor's office of contract services, give it new powers and charge it with giving, creating new rules around contract advances and partial payment of invoices and perhaps the late payment of interest.
0:27:53
People have called for structural changes to the PPB, which plays a big role in regulating procurement.
0:27:59
There's been a call to reform the way that discretionary contracts of some kinds are processed because it can be easier to process these as grants rather than contracts, especially where there's a proliferation of very small awards in the form of discretionary contracts.
0:28:13
And other ways to streamline contract contracting practices, like enabling more master agreements or facilitating the automatic renewal of multiyear contracts.
0:28:23
Next slide.
0:28:25
We have also heard that the charter's land use procedures can get in the way of certain critical climate and infrastructure investments.
0:28:33
It's probably not a surprise that our charter needs an overhaul in this way.
0:28:37
In 1989, that was just one year after NASA scientist James Hansen went to the US Senate and testified about the existence of a, quote, greenhouse effect.
0:28:46
So we perhaps did not have the urgency of the climate crisis most in mind when we last looked at this issue.
0:28:52
Today, we've heard testimony that the existing charter process makes it very difficult to do common sense changes that help protect vulnerable communities, like raising the grade of a street by just a couple of feet, which today can require a full Euler process, or acquiring certain property or making certain mapping actions that are consistent with making our waterfront more resilient.
0:29:15
We've also heard that the current system, which requires a full ULURP to simply buy out homeowners that are vulnerable, makes it very difficult to do voluntary buyouts and keeps homeowners in danger.
0:29:26
We've also heard that our existing system of revocable consents and franchises may be significantly complicating our ability to scale up electrical vehicle infrastructure across the city.
0:29:36
Certainly, many of my neighborhoods and neighbors in Brooklyn are like taking outlets and streaming weird cords out of their windows to try to charge their electric vehicles.
0:29:45
That certainly doesn't seem like a sustainable solution over time if we're going to move off gas dependent cars.
0:29:52
Next slide.
0:29:53
And finally, we have heard people say that we should probably do something we might have considered doing in 1898, which is creating one map of the city.
0:30:03
Many will be surprised to know that today our city map is spread across five different borough president county offices across over 8,000 individual pieces of paper, and that this system, is very much rooted in the middle of the last century, can complicate many everyday functions and slow the development process or address assignment and gum up the works.
0:30:25
So the staff recommend looking at the centralization and digitization of a city map, which could potentially make almost simultaneous today I mean, tomorrow, changes that today can take weeks and months.
0:30:39
Those are the proposals of the staff to you, and we welcome your questions.
Sharon Greenberger
0:30:46
Before we open up the question,
Richard R. Buery Jr.
0:30:47
I just wanna thank you and the staff for an incredible amount of work.
0:30:51
It really is across a range of complex issues with range of voice and opinions.
0:31:01
I think a really powerful effort both to harmonize ideas, but also to make clear judgments, you know, and clear recommendations, which we deeply appreciate.
0:31:11
But with that, let's open up to questions or comments from commissioners.