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New Analysis Details Just How Late and Over-Budget City Infrastructure Projects Run


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Infrastructure projects (photo: Edward Reed/City Council)


New York City’s capital budget for building and maintaining essential infrastructure is dense, complicated, and opaque, making it difficult to examine how the city spends its funds and on what projects. It is well known, though, that the city’s capital budget process has been notoriously inefficient and rife with cost overruns and delays, leading to many questions about how the city is spending tens of billions of dollars on essential infrastructure maintenance, upgrades, and development.

Now, a new independent portal created by civic technologists is attempting to provide more clarity into that immense spending program, with a snapshot that shows just how inefficient capital spending can be and how thousands of projects are delayed or over budget.

The capital budget has grown significantly under Mayor Bill de Blasio’s tenure and the latest adopted budget for the 2022 fiscal year, which began July 1, projects about $17 billion in capital spending for the fiscal year alone, as part of an overall $133.7 billion ten-year capital strategy. Of that ten-year strategy, about $70.5 billion, or 53%, is projected just for ensuring city infrastructure is in a state of good repair. But capital projects have been perennially beset with problems, and often tend to start late, balloon in cost, and finish well past their timelines, sometimes by years.

In recent years, the de Blasio administration and the City Council have taken measures to improve the capital budgeting process, creating more realistic timelines and spreading out spending over the years rather than frontloading the budget. Capital budget documents are also, as required by law, uploaded to the city’s open data portal to allow the general public access to line item details. But that data can be difficult to read unless one knows what to look for. It does not show, for instance, the original projected costs or timeline for any particular project.

WeGov, a civic technology initiative, examined available capital project data dating back to 2019 but including projects as far back as 2001, to present an easier picture of the city’s infrastructure landscape, and the results are damning. It examined 5,263 projects with an original estimated total cost of nearly $77 billion, but that has grown to $148.5 billion. Of the total projects, 2,624 are running past their projected timelines and 2,990 are over budget; 997 are starting late and 2,946 are ending late.

The portal details projects across the city. For instance, the renovation of the Midtown Community Court, which began in 2001 and was meant to be completed by 2005, has had its timeline extended to 2030 and seen its cost increase from $17.8 million to $64.7 million. The construction of the Croton water filtration plant in the Bronx began in 2007, nearly three years late, and was originally scheduled for completion that year. Instead, it is now expected to be done in 2023, roughly $3.9 billion over budget.

There are, of course, projects that are on schedule and within budget such as repairs to the Delaware Aqueduct, which began in 2008 and will be done by 2025, nearly $75 million under budget.

Devin Balkind, a civic technologist who led the project and is the Libertarian candidate for public advocate in this year’s election, said the portal is an attempt to make sense of the vast capital budget and to help the public and policy-makers hold the mayoral administration accountable.

“I'm trying to do what I can to bring best practices from the...public interest technology universe to city government,” he said. “My method for doing that is making the things that I wish the government made.”

The portal maps out the location of specific capital projects, outlines each project’s budget, the source of their funding, and how spending on projects has changed with different iterations of the budget over the years. It is part of a larger data-driven initiative that also analyzes agency-specific data including everything from headcount to expense budgets to City Council discretionary funding.

Balkind said the project was inspired by the city’s longstanding practice of presenting hundreds of capital projects in online PDFs, inaccessible for complicated data crunching.

“This is the type of thing that people who work in technology make fun of government for, making data available in that type of format,” he said in a phone interview. In recent years, though the data has been made available through open data sets by the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics, it still remains hard to visualize.

“The point of this is to help mobilize the public to take a bigger interest in capital projects, to document capital projects, put pressure on the government to release better data about capital projects, to make it evident to the people who actually produce these projects and to OMB, who kind of oversees this, that the public's watching,” he added.

Laura Feyer, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, said in a statement, “City Hall has taken steps to improve capital project delivery and is currently leading an advisory board that is singularly focused on improving the City's practices around capital data reporting.”

Feyer noted that OMB has published more than 8,000 pages of information about the various aspects of the capital budget. The administration has also taken steps to improve the capital process, including by cutting the Certificate to Proceed approval process times by more than half and successfully pushing for design/build authorization from the state for many projects, which reduces both cost and timelines. The Department of Design and Construction has also streamlined its internal change order review process. And the Department of City Planning recently launched a website detailing the ten-year capital strategy.

Calculating costs and timelines for a particular project is also complicated, she noted. For instance, the administration may set aside funding for a project even if it does not start in a particular fiscal year, giving the impression that the project is delayed.

An April report from the Center for an Urban Future found that the city could save as much as $800 million over five years by instituting additional reforms to the capital project design and construction process. But in a September 13 op-ed for the New York Daily News, DDC Commissioner Jamie Torres-Springer laid some blame for the city’s capital construction woes on the state. “[O]ur own internal plan to improve can only go so far as long as the City’s capital construction process is hamstrung by arcane rules that require state legislation to change,” he wrote.

But Balkind pointed to certain examples of delayed projects that are particularly egregious in the wake of the recent emergency flash flooding in the city caused by Hurricane Ida. Streets flooded across the five boroughs and 13 people died as sewage and wastewater infrastructure failed to accommodate the record-level heavy rains, raising questions and concerns about the city’s storm preparedness and resiliency measures in the nine years since Hurricane Sandy. One project to replace and augment stormwater systems in Laurelton, Queens was $154 million over budget and five-and-a-half years behind schedule; another to build bioswales and greenstreets in South Ozone Park, Queens was $12 million over budget and more than three years behind; yet another to replace a storm sewer and water main on Jamaica Avenue was $15 million over cost and two-and-a-half years late.

Even without record levels of rain, the city is particularly prone to flooding, and not only across its extensive waterfront. The city’s sewer and water infrastructure were not designed to handle either increasingly treacherous weather or the expansion of roads, highways and concrete surfaces that do not absorb water like permeable green spaces.

Mayor de Blasio touted the city’s $20 billion resiliency plan in the wake of Sandy, including $2 billion allocated through 2025 to drainage system projects in Southeast Queens, where New Yorkers drowned in basement apartments because of the flash flooding.

“From now on, what I think we do is tell New Yorkers to expect the very, very worst. It may sound alarmist at times, but unfortunately, it's being proven by nature,” de Blasio said at a September 2 news conference, addressing the aftermath of Ida. “The infrastructure investments – look, $2 billion to Southeast Queens is a big deal. But what we're seeing is we're going to need more than we ever possibly imagined. Thank God for the first time in our lifetimes almost, the federal government is finally truly committed to infrastructure spending. But I think what's – I don't think it's too little too late. I think it would have helped us a hell of a lot more a few decades ago, but we're going to be playing a lot of catch up but we're talking not billions, tens of billions, even hundreds of billions to really be able to make people safe.”

Balkind hopes that his data project will help the public understand where their taxes are directed and to push the administration to improve its delivery of projects and services. “We’re off the charts in terms of inefficiency and we pay for that all the time,” Balkind said, “and capital projects are a very obvious way we pay for that.”

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

Note: Gotham Gazette has hired an affiliate of WeGov for one information technology project.

Report Takes Closer Look at Low-Income New Yorkers' Concerns About Long-Term Covid Impacts


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New Yorkers lined up for food (photo: Emil Cohen/City Council)


Newly-released survey data confirms lower-income New Yorkers were far more worried about the long-term effects of the pandemic and its economic fallout than their moderate- and higher-income counterparts after the pandemic's first and most devastating peak last spring.

According to a study conducted by Community Service Society -- a nonprofit advocating for disadvantaged New Yorkers -- in collaboration with Lake Research Partners, New Yorkers in the lowest income tiers were most concerned with how they would rebound from the virus, the sunken economy, and housing instability, even as the first covid wave was receding. Educational losses were another focus. At the bottom of the list of concerns were both law and order and institutional racism.

The data, collected in over 1,600 interviews between July and August 2020, highlights the precarious position of poor and underserved New Yorkers relying on the social safety net. CSS and Lake are now releasing the latest batch of findings in a report previewed by Gotham Gazette. Previously released results showed over half of Black, Latino, and immigrant respondents had not received unemployment insurance or federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance at the time of the survey.

The instability was even more pronounced among families with children. Sixty-percent of low-income respondents raising kids lost their jobs either temporarily or permanently, compared to 44% of middle- or higher-income residents. The experience compounded both economic instability and inequities.

The newly-released data also shows that, at the time, most New Yorkers across income levels were unlikely to consider permanently leaving the city due to the pandemic or economic factors, with roughly three-quarters unlikely to move. Nevertheless, young and Latino residents, and families with children, said they were more likely to move out permanently, at a rate of 31-36% of those respondents.

The study's authors say the findings upend certain narratives that have dominated the pandemic era -- among them that wealthy New Yorkers would flee the city under lockdown, and that crime was a top concern in low-income communities.

"The concept of public safety was such an issue during this most recent mayoral [primary] campaign and not enough attention was paid to issues that low-income New Yorkers had cared about and were exacerbated by the pandemic," said Irene Lew, a policy analyst at Community Service Society and the author of the report.

Lew believes politicians like Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee for mayor, also need to "move forward" from the rhetoric of a wealth flight. "Eric Adams still continues to make this point that the rich are going to leave New York but we're not actually seeing that in the [survey] data," she said. (Adams is expected to win the general election based on the city's high ratio of registered Democrats to Republicans.)

To Lew, the fact that 32% respondents under age 35 said they were likely to permanently leave the city meant officials should be focused on bolstering industries where that population is more likely to work. Those include retail, hospitality, and entertainment. Community Service Society also recommends expanding paid internships for high school students, something many candidates, including Adams, discussed on the campaign trail.

"We need to focus on making sure they feel like the city is working for them," Lew said of the younger generations.

At the peak of the pandemic in May 2020, the city's unemployment rate reached a staggering 20%. By July 2021, that rate had fallen to 10.5% -- nearly three times pre-pandemic levels -- according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Titled "Unheard Third," the annual survey is meant to shed light on the third of voting-age New Yorkers that earn the least and are often neglected by elected officials. It broke respondents down into five income categories based on household income for a family of four. They ranged from families earning at or below $26,000 a year to families making over $105,000 annually.

The survey showed that the lowest earners had a more pessimistic view about the pandemic's impact on their family's income and child's education than moderate- or high-wage earners. Seventy-four percent of low-income respondents felt the pandemic would lead to a "long-lasting setback" in income, compared to 52% of middle- and high-income participants. Sixty-nine percent felt the same about their child's education, compared to 61% of the upper-income tiers.

Housing and the risk of homelessness was another major concern for New Yorkers. That anxiety has likely been exacerbated lately by uncertainty around the state’s eviction moratorium (which lawmakers recently extended to January) and as the state has struggled to disburse emergency rental assistance.

Advocates and their champions in the state Legislature say the city should focus on converting vacant and distressed properties into affordable housing, which was recently made possible by state law. "This is probably the fastest way to create permanently affordable units," Lew said. One alternative -- rezoning to allow for denser housing, including affordable units as required by law -- requires going through the city's lengthy land use process and facing pushback from opponents of development.

Expanding right-to-counsel for tenants facing eviction is another measure that can mitigate housing anxiety, CSS argued in the report. Increasing funding for the Fare Fairs program of discounted Metrocards could also alleviate pressure on low-income households and make jobs more accessible.

Compared to higher-income earners, New Yorkers facing housing insecurity "are just really concerned about the long-term impacts of this pandemic on their family's future in this city," Lew said.

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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

Max Politics Podcast: City Council Member Keith Powers on Oversight of City Jails, Running for Speaker, & More


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City Council Member Keith Powers (photo: Jeff Reed/City Council)


September 8, 2021 - Max Politics Podcast: City Council Member Keith Powers on Oversight of City Jails & More

City Council Member Keith Powers, a Manhattan Democrat who chairs the Council's criminal justice committee, joined the show to discuss the crisis in city jails and the steps he's taking and monitoring to improve conditions, including an emergency stakeholder meeting he coordinated and a Council oversight hearing he will soon chair. Powers also discussed efforts to reopen the city economy and create a more resilient city, and his bid to become the next City Council Speaker.

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter @TweetBenMax. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.

Read more: Max Politics Podcast: City Council Member Keith Powers on Oversight of City Jails, Running for...



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