Guiding Principle 1:

Maintain New York City’s financial responsibility

The City finances its capital program primarily by issuing bonds and remains committed to maintaining sustainable levels of debt. We maintain assets in a state of good repair and improve their performance, which helps mitigate larger construction costs and reduces energy use in the future. The City works to maintain realistic annual budget allocations and find savings through improved and coordinated project design, procurement, and construction practices 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 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 the 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. For example, DDC’s pilot of five building conditions assessments for the Brooklyn Public Library will inform planning, decision- making, scope development, and budgeting decisions about every aspect of these facilities. Through regular inspections and asset management improvements, we are also making our city safer for residents.

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

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, the central managing agency for much of the City’s capital investments, is advancing key reforms to early project planning to approach asset maintenance holistically and support citywide strategic goals.

DDC’s Advanced Capital Planning program, currently under development, will provide information and expertise to the agency’s public building sponsors during early planning stages to facilitate long-term planning. To launch the program, DDC is developing a data portal that will integrate key sources of public buildings information currently stored in separate, disconnected systems. This data includes building conditions assessments, capital project documents, building energy performance, and GIS-based data sources such as floodplains, stormwater, and heat maps. 

In addition, DDC’s Front-End Planning Unit (FEP) conducts a comprehensive assessment of every project’s scope, budget and schedule, regulatory requirements, and risks before initiation. DDC’s FEP helps ensure that common causes of delay, like regulatory processes, budget constraints, or adverse on-site conditions are identified and addressed before projects start. In addition, the unit screens a project for innovative delivery approaches, including design-build, expanded work allowance, and other construction contracting methods to assess the most efficient and effective way to deliver each project. 

Another example is the Capital Project Initiation (CPI) form, created to communicate the scope of newly created projects between agencies including DEP, DOT, and DDC. This improves early coordination among city agencies on the reconstruction of roadways, sewers, and other subsurface infrastructure that often require 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. 

The City also continues to make capital procurement more efficient and transparent through investments in state-of-the-art systems like the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services’ (MOCS) Procurement and Sourcing Solutions Portal (PASSPort), which serves as the City’s central online portal for procurement for more than 7,000 agency staff and 40,000 vendors. We are also streamlining contracting practices to deliver construction faster and at lower cost, through new practices like design-build project delivery.