Mayor Eric Adams’ administration is mounting a push for state lawmakers to pass a set of bills loosening some of the rules that govern the city’s notoriously slow capital process, which city leaders say would allow major projects to get done more quickly and cheaply.
The city needs permission from the state to make many changes to how it signs contracts with builders and contractors. The Adams administration wants the ability to use two contracting models that pair designers with builders earlier in the process, allowing for smoother collaboration, rather than handing off a completed design for a contractor to build.
“Think of your kitchen — it’s past its prime, it’s got leaks, it’s got flaws. Would you hire someone who’s never seen it to design it?” said Meera Joshi, deputy mayor for operations, at a City Hall event on Wednesday.
Also on the city’s agenda is another bill that would convert the Department of Design and Construction from a city agency to a public authority, akin to the Economic Development Corp. or the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Doing so would give DDC — which handles some $33 billion in capital projects — the ability to procure goods more quickly, the administration says.
City officials say the change would be especially useful for huge climate-oriented projects like seawalls, sewers and stormwater infrastructure. But it’s unclear whether state lawmakers, who tend to resist the city’s efforts to take on more autonomy, will have the appetite to let the city make such a major change to an agency like DDC.
Rachel Fauss, senior policy advisor for watchdog group Reinvent Albany, noted that increasing the use of design-build might limit the bidding pool to contractors with the ability to use that system, potentially resulting in less competition and higher costs for the city.
“We want to make sure that the process isn’t made less competitive,” Fauss said. State lawmakers, she added, will “have to weigh the pros and cons.”
As for making DDC an authority, Fauss noted that the quasi-public entities are infamous for being less than transparent with their finances. Adams’ administration has said that the future DDC authority would be subject to audits and reporting rules, but “the devil’s in the details,” Fauss said.
City leaders will push for two additional bills that would relax public comment requirements for new contracts, removing weekslong delays; and invite more small and minority-owned businesses to compete for projects by giving them insurance.
Much of the agenda stems from recommendations made by a task force Adams convened at the start of his term, charged with coming up with ideas to improve the capital process. The city succeeded in passing four of its desired state-level reforms last year — including allowing electronic bidding and raising the threshold for no-bid contracts to minority- and women-owned businesses to $1.5 million — and will now spend the last month of the state’s legislative session pushing for its remaining five policies.
New York City first won the ability in 2020 to use design-build contracts on public works projects, saving costs by letting a single entity handle both design and construction. The city is using the method to build the increasingly costly borough-based jails set to replace Rikers Island, which are now expected to cost a combined $16 billion.
The two new contracting processes the administration wants are called progressive design-build and construction manager-build. CM-Build lets a single construction firm manage a project and control underlying contracts for materials and labor, shaving time off the procurement process. The city already used the method to build vaccination centers during the pandemic, and now wants to use it to outfit libraries and cultural institutions with climate-resilient materials.
The other new method, progressive design-build, would let the city choose contractors before finalizing a project’s scope and price. Adams has said the city would use the method to construct nearly $9 billion in climate projects, including completing the greenway around Manhattan and resurfacing a buried stream in the Bronx.
A bill that would authorize the two new methods, known collectively as alternative delivery, has not yet been introduced in Albany, but a DDC spokesman said the city said the legislation is being drawn up by Assembly and Senate leaders. The legislation to make DDC an authority is also still pending, but the bills relating for public hearings and insurance have both been introduced.
Most of the proposals appear to face little organized opposition. Instead, the city’s failure to pass them in Albany last year was due to simple “inertia,” City Comptroller Brad Lander said at Wednesday’s rally.
“There just wasn’t time to move these across the line,” said Lander, an antagonist of the mayor’s who has nonetheless teamed up with him on efforts to improve the capital process.
But red-tape-cutting contract reforms have been known to backfire in some cases. The bribery scandal that hit the New York City Housing Authority in February, resulting in 70 indictments, stemmed from a system of no-bid micropurchase contracts originally intended to facilitate repairs more quickly.
Nick Garber , 2024-05-09 12:03:04
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