Guiding Principle 1:

Maintain New York City’s financial responsibility

The City of New York finances its capital program primarily through the issuance of bonds. The City remains committed to maintaining sustainable levels of debt in a dynamic fiscal climate while meeting our legal mandates and prioritizing critical life safety projects. We will maintain assets in a state of good repair, which contributes to financial responsibility by mitigating larger construction costs in the future. The City works to maintain realistic annual budget allocations and find savings through coordinated project design, procurement, and construction across City agencies.

Financial Responsibility

Since the late 1980’s, the City and fiscal monitoring agencies measure the debt service burden as a percentage of tax revenues. It is the best measure of debt burden because it puts debt service within the context of the City’s own resources. These credit strengths have a real impact on New Yorkers: a strong demand for bonds reduces the costs of maintaining roads, bridges, schools, and other capital investments, and saves taxpayers money.

This TYCS demonstrates our commitment to meeting legal mandates and enhancing the capacity and quality of our assets. Moreover, it maintains infrastructure that is critical to fostering long-term economic growth and improving quality of life for New Yorkers.

Maintaining our infrastructure in a state of good repair

Through maintaining our current infrastructure, we make sure our investments serve New Yorkers better today, and for longer into the future. Regular maintenance of our infrastructure saves money over time, as these routine expenses reduce the need for major, often more costly repairs and more frequent replacement. Through regular inspections and asset management improvements, we are also making our City safer for residents.

For example, SCA keeps our schools in a state of good repair through an annual visual survey of architectural, electrical, and mechanical components of buildings. SCA produces component ratings that help the agency prioritize projects based on asset conditions. Other agencies complete similar work, such as DDC’s pilot of five building conditions assessments for the Brooklyn Public Library. These assessments will inform planning, decision-making, scope development and budgeting decisions about every aspect of these facilities.

For more detail on how the City is working toward this principle in the near term, see Investment Priority 1.

Fostering efficient project implementation through coordinated planning and procurement

Coordinated project planning can yield cost efficiencies, shorten project timelines, and reduce disruption to communities from construction work. DDC, a central managing agency for much of the City’s capital investments, is strengthening working relationships across capital projects and facilitating data-sharing of planned projects amongst key City agencies, like DOT and DEP, and private utility partners. The agency is making strides toward a data-sharing initiative that would overlay capital plans and enable parties to proactively plan for and coordinate across capital projects and programs.

In addition, DDC’s Front-End Planning Unit (FEP) facilitates communication between agencies to share project scoping, discuss state of good repair improvements, and identify project timelines that might benefit from coordinated project delivery. DDC FEP also helps ensure that common causes of delay, such as regulatory or budget constraints or adverse field conditions, are identified and addressed before projects start. FEP utilizes a design-build screening tool to review incoming projects for eligibility and potential for increased efficiency and innovation to determine whether to recommend a project for design-build delivery.

Another such example is DOT and DEP coordination on reconstruction to roadways, sewers, and other subsurface infrastructure that often requires street excavation, which can be costly and disruptive to the surrounding community. Project alignment among agencies and private utility providers is essential to make sure all work can be completed on a schedule that avoids repeated excavations of the same street. DOT and DEP coordinate on planning for street reconstruction projects, safety improvements, and sewer and water main upgrades.

The City continues to make our capital procurement more efficient and transparent through investments in state-of-the-art systems like MOCS’s Procurement and Sourcing Solutions Portal (PASSPort), which has served as the City’s central, online portal for procurement for more than 6,000 agency staff and 27,000 vendors. We are also streamlining contracting practices to deliver construction faster and at lower cost, through new practices like design-build project delivery.