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TESTIMONY
Testimony by Nicole Campo, Senior Advisor for Land Use Planning at Langan Engineering, on reforming the city map process
1:14:54
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3 min
Nicole Campo, Senior Advisor for Land Use Planning at Langan Engineering and a former city planner, testifies on the need to reform the official city map process.
She describes the current system where physical paper maps are held in five different borough president offices, making access and research cumbersome and inefficient.
While acknowledging the Department of City Planning's efforts to digitize maps, she notes these are not legally the official city map, leading to continued uncertainty.
- Campo argues for a centralized, digitally accessible official city map and a more coordinated approach among city agencies regarding street-related issues to avoid project delays.
Nicole Campo
1:14:54
Hi.
1:14:55
Good evening, and thank you to all for spending your time serving the city in this way and listening to everyone.
1:15:02
My name is Nicole Campo.
1:15:04
I'm a senior advisor for land use planning for Langan Engineering.
1:15:10
So I guess I'm representing my company, but I'm also representing sort of the practitioners in my area.
1:15:17
I'm a born and raised Staten Islander, now Brooklynite.
1:15:22
I worked on street mapping issues since I was a baby planner in the agencies well over twenty years ago now, which is crazy.
1:15:34
But I, in part, have gained, you know, for those who have worked with me, some people know me as a New York City streets expert, and that is not a thing one should even need to be to get through processes in New York City.
1:15:53
But it speaks to some of the previous comments about some of the difficulties with permitting and other approvals that could use reform.
1:16:04
You know, as others referred to, but I will explain, the official city map is actually a collection of physical paper maps that, you know, are like what you do architectural kind of sketches on.
1:16:19
You pull them out of a drawer and they each sit in five different boroughs because each borough president is in charge of their boroughs portions of the city map.
1:16:30
And until only a few years ago, if you needed to find out the width of that street at that particular corner or whether or not it was officially mapped or just a record street or the ownership, I mean, you had to physically go to the office, get somebody to help you pull the maps out of the drawer, find the map, and then continue on with your research.
1:16:55
Since then, the Department of City Planning went through an amazing effort to digitize as many of those paper maps as they could possibly get their hands on.
1:17:06
It's on their website.
1:17:07
It's, you know, NYC streets.
1:17:11
And it's pretty cool.
1:17:13
And it also saves a ton of time.
1:17:15
But unfortunately, legally, it is not the official city map because they cannot claim that they have every single map scanned there.
1:17:24
So you're still left with questions and, you know, it's not fully defensible and you may still have to go searching for this thing.
1:17:35
And so besides the fact that, you know, these maps are officially still on paper in five different boroughs and drawers, you know, just getting different city agencies to get on the same page about streets is difficult.
1:17:52
And never mind, you know, when there's five different boroughs kind of working separately and I can answer more questions, but that's the item I think needs reform.