Statement by Comptroller Brad Lander on Charter Revision Commission’s Meaningless Proposals and Effort to Distract New Yorkers

Statement by Comptroller Brad Lander on Charter Revision Commission's Meaningless Proposals and Effort to Distract New Yorkers

NEW YORK, NY - New York City Comptroller Brad Lander released the following statement in response to the Adams Administration's release of its Charter Revision Commission proposals:

"The Adams Administration's Charter Revision Commission ballot proposal #4 claims to draw on my office's recommendations to promote more transparency around the City's infrastructure and capital planning process. That is entirely untrue. Proposal #4 is meaningless, does not advance transparency, and fails to improve the City's capital planning process in any way. Like the Commission's rushed process and other recommendations, it is simply a cynical effort to distract New Yorkers.

Despite this Commission's absurdly short timeline, my office took seriously the opportunity to put forward five common-sense proposals that would meaningfully improve our City's financial management practices. Sadly, we considered the Commission's process more thoughtfully than it did. While it claims that our proposals "reflect shared priorities," the Commission acknowledges that its process was too rushed to take them seriously.

Falsely claiming that ballot proposal #4 is based on the serious recommendations my office provided is a transparently false attempt to lend credibility to a meaningless measure. As detailed in my office's in-depth audit, accompanying review of national best practices, and recommendationsto the Charter Revision Commission, the City's comprehensive infrastructure report (the Asset Inventory Management System, or AIMS report, required by Section 1110-a of the City Charter) is in desperate need of an overhaul.

The AIMS report fails to identify the true costs of capital projects and excludes crucial City assets, leaving us without an accurate inventory of infrastructure needs or comprehensive assessment of the conditions of its infrastructure assets, including the pipes that deliver clean drinking water, the schools and libraries that serve our communities, the roads and sidewalks that get New Yorkers where they need to go, and the increasingly overwhelmed sewers that carry rainwater away. The AIMS report fails to even estimate the cost to bring that infrastructure to a state of good repair, let alone identify the most urgent priorities for repairs.

Ballot proposal #4 does nothing to fix these foundational failures in how the City manages its infrastructure. Unlike our recommendations, the Commission's proposal does not amend Section 1110-a of the Charter, leaving the AIMS report incomplete, inadequate and wholly unhelpful with respect to informing our City's capital budget.

Instead, proposal #4 cynically proposes to amend an entirely different process - the Citywide Statement of Needs - which covers less than 1% of the City's infrastructure, a short list of new projects, where the City is already proposing to build something new, expand an existing facility, or close a facility. This past year, the Cityincluded just 24 new proposals in the Citywide Statement of Needs; in comparison, the City's last asset inventory includes over 5,000 assets. Requiring the Citywide Statement of Needs to include additional detail on facility condition is meaningless for capital budget planning purposes - since these are in fact the projects that the City has already decided need to be improved and to invest funds to do so.

Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of our City's infrastructure assets will continue to go unchecked, without standardized or rigorous assessment of state of good repair or estimates of cost. The Commission's proposal asks the City to "consider" the conditions of its infrastructure in putting together its ten-year capital strategy, without requiring the City to actually have a meaningful assessment of the conditions of its infrastructure.

The Commission also blithely mischaracterized and dismissed the other proposals my office put forward. We invited it to demonstrate its independence and seriousness by adopting provisions to strengthen the City's fiscal management, build reserves, achieve long-term efficiencies, overhaul capital planning, and pay vendors on time. Sadly, it chose not to.

The proposals released by the Charter Revision Commission are meaningless in their impact, a cynical effort to distract New Yorkers, and an affront to the tenets of good government in the New York City Charter that they were supposed to heed and improve."

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