Maintain New York City’s financial responsibility

The capital program is primarily financed through the issuance of bonds. The city remains committed to maintaining sustainable levels of debt in a dynamic fiscal climate while meeting the city’s legal mandates and prioritizing critical life safety projects. The city 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.

Maintaining our responsible debt management practices

Since the late 1980s, 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 resources. These credit strengths have a real impact on New Yorkers: strong demand for bonds reduces the costs of maintaining roads, bridges, schools, and other capital investments, and saves taxpayers money.

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

Maintaining our infrastructure in a state of good repair

Maintaining existing infrastructure is a core component of the city’s Capital Strategy, as responsible management and maintenance of the city’s investments ensures that they will serve New Yorkers present and future. This maintenance is also a cost-saving measure, by helping to avoid costly replacements that require more substantial capital investment. Additionally, keeping infrastructure in a state of good repair is fundamental to public health and safety. New Yorkers depend on this physical infrastructure every day, whether it’s the large and visible transportation network, the lesser-seen sanitation and sewer systems, or other assets in the city’s portfolio. Maintaining these essential infrastructure responsibly is crucial to ensuring that New Yorkers can continue to rely on them.

Fostering efficient project implementation through coordinated planning and procurement

Well-coordinated project planning can yield cost efficiencies, shorten project timelines, and reduce disruption to communities from construction work, ensuring the city delivers the best value to the public. DDC, a central managing agency for much of the city’s capital investments, is advancing key reforms to early project planning to approach assets holistically and support citywide strategic goals.

One measure for promoting efficient and effective project planning is DDC’s Front-End Planning Unit (FEP). The unit conducts comprehensive assessments of every project’s scope, budget and schedule, regulatory requirements, and risks prior to initiation. These assessments help identify common causes of delays — such as regulatory processes, budget limitations, or challenging field conditions — so they can be addressed proactively before projects begin. FEP’s work also extends to implementation, where they identify and evaluate innovative delivery approaches, including design-build, expanded work allowance, and other construction contract tools to assess the most efficient and effective way of delivering each project.

The city has also invested in its capital procurement processes, leveraging innovative systems technology like the MOCS Procurement and Sourcing Solutions Portal (PASSPort), which serves as the city’s central procurement portal for more than 7,000 agency staff and 40,000 vendors. The city is also streamlining contracting practices to deliver construction faster and at lower cost, through new practices like design-build project delivery.

DDC’s Advanced Capital Planning portal, currently in a pilot phase, will inform and provide expertise to support efficient project delivery of state of good repair investments while facilitate holistic, long-term capital planning for the public buildings portfolio. DDC, with support from the Department of City Planning (DCP), is expanding the pilot to include more sponsor agencies and facilities, enhance asset survey data, and establish a prioritization framework for new needs in high-growth neighborhoods. The portal provides data on building condition assessments, capital project documents, and energy performance. It also integrates GIS-based information — such as floodplain maps, stormwater data, and heat maps — to identify critical facilities during severe weather. In later phases, it will expand to incorporate new critical data points gathered on site, including ADA-accessibility, key climate planning information, and assets available for various emergency scenarios.

Along with enhancements to the DDC portal, city agencies continues to prioritize increased transparency around capital project processes and agency-specific strategy for targeted, efficient investments that align infrastructure upgrades with broader development efforts. To complement the portal, the Advanced Capital Planning initiative aims to tie disparate data into a coherent, actionable and efficient capital planning tool, similar to DCP’s Capital Project Portal.