Will the New City Council Reform Its Rules?
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (photo: John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit)
With a new City Council class and new speaker leading the legislative body, there is another opportunity to change the Council’s internal rules, which haven't been formally revised since 2014.
It's a relatively obscure corner of public policy because in a city of 8.8 million people the rules apply only to the 51 elected Council members and a few hundred Council staff. But Council members and advocates have for years pointed to measures that could make the body's processes more democratic and transparent, and impact the law-making and budgetary decisions felt directly by millions of constituents.
Speaker Adrienne Adams, just two months into her new role at the helm, has said her staff is examining Council rules but hasn't indicated what, if anything, could change and if changes would be made administratively or through the official rule-making process.
Council rules determine how legislation is drafted, debated, and advanced, how important benchmarks are communicated publicly, and other ways the city’s legislature is run and governed internally. They also lay the ground rules for how Council resources, from staffing to discretionary funding, is allocated – tools at times used by the speaker to reward and punish members.
Most of this City Council is newly-elected, and it includes many ‘firsts,’ including the first Black speaker and first female majority. Adams has promised a collaborative leadership style, but it is to be seen if she will back formal rules changes to democratize the Council. New committee assignments have been made, and as Adams begins to show how she will lead the Council, the new speaker has hired a number of top aides who in many ways run the day-to-day of the Council, along with mainstays of the Council’s central staff. Jockeying for legislative and budget priorities has begun, as has the Council’s examination of Mayor Eric Adams’ preliminary budget, initiating a period in which Council speakers typically exercise their most influence.
New York City's good government groups are calling on Adams to hold a hearing on Council rules with the hope of paving the way for possible changes. In a letter to Speaker Adams last month, the groups – Citizens Union, Common Cause New York, New York City League of Women Voters, NYPIRG, and Reinvent Albany – urged the speaker to hold a hearing before approving rules for the current 2022-2023 session.
"With more than two-thirds of Council Members new to the office, the beginning of this Council session provides an opportunity to turn New York City's legislative body more collaborative, efficient, transparent, and accountable," reads the letter.
The groups did not propose specific changes in the letter but current and former Council members have expressed interest in reforming procedures to give rank-and-file members more control over advancing legislation and City Council resources.
High on the list for many is amending the body's so-called "first-in-time" policy, which gives priority to the earliest member to request bill-drafting services from the Council's central staff on similar legislation. The practice allows lawmakers to anonymously sit on draft bills indefinitely, at times blocking their introduction and frustrating other members who want to see their version of the bill introduced, considered, and passed.
"There are a lot of really great legislative ideas that have sat in a closet somewhere for many many years, for whatever reason, and they'll continue to sit there because this rule exists and it prohibits the rest of us from being able to move on those issues," said Council Member Diana Ayala at a forum of Council speaker candidates in November, hosted by the Working Families Party.
Members tried to get around this in 2017, when they proposed adding deadlines to introduce legislation as part of a package of over 30 measures supported by more than half the Council, including Adams and Council Member Corey Johnson, then one of eight candidates for the speaker's chair who went on to become Council speaker from 2018 through 2021. They included greater membership involvement in Council policy and budget negotiations, more discretion to committee chairs on staffing matters, childcare for members and staff, and added resources to key committees like Land Use and Oversight and Investigations. It also called for a public hearing.
When he took the speakership in 2018, Johnson made a number of changes administratively and left others on the table without holding a hearing or formally amending the Council rules.
The Council voted to significantly increase its budget and increased staffing for land use, finance, and legislative services. It created a dedicated investigations unit trained on city agencies. Johnson also made adjustments to the new bill-drafting unit that had begun under his predecessor, Melissa Mark-Viverito, but the first-in-time policy and others that frustrated members and advocates remained. While the Council has been democratized over the years, especially through changes made under Mark-Viverito in 2014, the speaker’s office and central staff of the Council retain significant power over what bills wind up being drafted, introduced, heard, and passed.
A spokesperson for Speaker Adams told Gotham Gazette it is "a priority to strengthen the Council as an institution" but did not respond directly to specific proposals, including several repeatedly cited by Council speaker candidates during last year’s race, or the call from advocates to hold a hearing.
“The Speaker and her team are examining Council rules and operations, engaging members and staff, and taking a broad view to improve the Council to ensure the body is an effective and strong co-equal legislative branch of city government," the spokesperson wrote in an email.
"The Speaker has been meeting with staff, investing in departments and leadership, and addressing internal functions," they wrote. "This all is key to making sure New Yorkers have the city government they deserve, and it requires collaboration, intention, and time.”
The spokesperson would not say whether Adams still supports the reforms she endorsed in the 2017 package.
It has been eight years since the last public hearing on Council rules in February 2014. That year Mark-Viverito and then-Rules Committee Chair Brad Lander, now the city comptroller, enacted a number of groundbreaking changes to diffuse some of the speaker's power over the body and insulate members from punishment when they act independently. Among the biggest changes was standardizing the discretionary funding members can distribute to nonprofits in their districts with a new formula to disburse additional funding to underserved areas. Another established the bill drafting unit that Johnson later shored up.
"Where I think we really made a difference was on discretionary funding, member items, which before that had really been used as a tool for reward and punish in which communities and often the lowest income communities suffered," Lander said in an interview. Previously, some members controlled expense and capital budgets ten times greater than others, he told Gotham Gazette.
"On the other hand, one area where we fell really short in 2018 was around legislative drafting and transparency in that system," he said. "A piece of the problem is that a first-in-time system without an expiration date creates a kind of black hole for legislation, which is very frustrating for members and advocates."
Changing the first-in-time policy is currently being discussed among Council leadership, according to Council Member Gale Brewer, who chairs the Committee on Oversight and Investigations and recently returned to the Council after a prior stint from 2002 through 2013 and then eight years as Manhattan Borough President.
"I believe that's one of the suggestions that is not going to be thrown out the window. That's what we got promised so I would assume that would happen," she said of discussions with the speaker's office.
According to Brewer, there are hundreds of bills leftover from the previous session that have yet to be assigned sponsors in the new City Council.
Brewer and other members have also said they want to see more notice when bills are aging or bill amendments are introduced, and more room to debate bills in committee meetings and floor discussions. Brewer also wants to see the Council move towards a hybrid physical-virtual public participation model, something the good government groups' letter alludes to, which could require changes to the state's Open Meetings Law. Currently, committee hearings are being held virtually but full-body Stated Meetings of the Council are in person.
Citizens Union wants to see the Council set up an email notification system where the public can sign up to track bills, committees, or issues, similar to one used by the State Senate. "If you don't work in politics, it can be hard to keep track of what Council members do," said Citizens Union policy director Ben Weinberg. “The easier we make it for people to follow legislation, agendas, and meetings, the more people we'll see engaged, beyond just lobbyists and folks in politics."
This past fall, the current Rules Committee chair, Keith Powers, who also endorsed the 2017 package as an incoming member, proposed ten Council reforms when he was contending for the speakership, the most robust reform agenda of any of the speaker candidates. It included changing first-in-time, transparency around bill aging and amendment, increasing units of appropriation in the budget, equity in capital funding, giving committee chairs more power to advance legislation, and staff development, among others.
"We don't talk about staff enough. I think staff could certainly use ongoing training on important issues like land use and budget and legislation," Powers said at the Working Families Party speaker candidate forum in November. Powers declined to comment for this article through a spokesperson.
Ben Kallos, a former Council member who hit his term limit last year, said standardizing member items was "a big deal" but it still left the speaker's own discretionary funding, worth tens of millions, as a tool to incentivize and penalize members.
"That is one of the last vestiges of the full speaker power and there are a lot of members where that money is incredibly important to their communities," he told Gotham Gazette. Johnson allegedly used discretionary funding to penalize members who voted against his budget in 2020 over a fight to defund the NYPD.
Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, said the system for assigning bills has often left central staff with too much discretion to control the flow of legislation and too little accountability. Members cannot see who else has requested bills making it difficult for like-minded members to advance legislation.
"It became a very political determination and it was a completely opaque selection process," Lerner said. "It's working the exact opposite way that that situation should work from a reform point of view."
Common Cause has recommended a number of reforms including eliminating member items completely, regulating the speaker's discretionary funding, "fast-tracking" bills sponsored by a majority of members, enacting strong sexual harassment deterrents, improving the Council's website, and reducing the number of committees, among others.
"No question we have too many committees," said one Council member, speaking anonymously. Because of other Council rules requiring committees to meet monthly, "you see hearings on nonsense," the member said. "They struggle to come up with a topic just so that a committee has a reason to vote."
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Questioning ‘Austerity,’ City Council Begins Examining Mayor Adams' $98.5 Billion Preliminary Budget
Speaker Adams with Council Members Brannan & Brewer (photo: William Alatriste/NYC Council)
The New York City Council on Wednesday kicked off the process of examining Mayor Eric Adams’ $98.5 billion preliminary budget proposal for the 2023 fiscal year, which begins July 1. It was the first of many hearings that will take place over the next several weeks as the Council digs into the first spending plan of Adams’ four-year term.
Last month, Adams proposed a somewhat cautious budget while stressing “fiscal discipline.” It reduced spending by about $4.3 billion compared to the last budget modification under his predecessor. The decrease is largely because of changing amounts of federal aid and some pre-payments into the next fiscal year that helped drive down out-year budget gaps.
Adams inherited a solid fiscal situation given massive amounts of federal aid and stronger than expected tax revenues, virtually erasing pandemic-induced deficits and vulnerabilities; but also a city budget with plenty of fat to trim given its immense growth over the years.
The new mayor, a Democrat, instituted a broad 3% Program to Eliminate the Gap (PEG) and identified a resulting $2 billion in savings across city government, but for a few agencies, while planning a reduction in the municipal workforce by 7,000 workers without layoffs. He outlined plans for spending one-time federal stimulus funds, made additions to the city’s reserves, and invested in programs to fund public safety, transit discounts for low-income New Yorkers, child care, summer youth employment, and more. On Wednesday, the Adams administration also released its online portal that tracks spending of federal stimulus funds, following the release of similar tracking tools by the state and city comptrollers.
[Read: 'Laser-Focused on Fiscal Discipline': Mayor Adams Presents First Budget Plan]
Adams’ budget proposal launched a monthslong process that includes an initial set of Council hearings, which will be followed by a formal budget response from the Council outlining its priorities, then the mayor’s executive budget -- which will take into account the new state budget due by April 1 -- followed by more Council hearings and negotiations and ultimately a city budget deal by July 1.
At Tuesday’s hearing, Council members pressed Adams administration officials, led by Budget Director Jacques Jiha, for explanations about agency cuts, called for increased funding for various departments and services, and questioned the city’s preparations for the near fiscal future when federal funds run out.
“The COVID-19 pandemic brought inequity and social injustice to the forefront and highlighted the need to develop policies and programs aimed to protect our most vulnerable populations,” said Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, a Queens Democrat, in her opening remarks. “As we continue to move forward on the road to recovery, we must ensure that this year's budget is fair and equitable for all and makes deeper investments for children and working families, workforce development, mental health public safety, health care, education,...senior and elder care, and outer borough priorities.”
Council Member Justin Brannan, a Brooklyn Democrat and chair of the Council’s finance committee, echoed concerns shared by many of his colleagues, that the city’s cuts in spending will impact necessary services and core agencies that hold up the city’s social safety net.
“I think we must be careful that these cuts don't veer into unintentional austerity,” he said in his opening statement. “I'm troubled that some of the proposed cuts could hinder the city's revival, making it harder to achieve a fair and equitable recovery for all,” he added, pointing to proposed cuts at the Departments of Sanitation, Parks and Recreation, the Administration for Children’s Services, Human Resources Administration, and Department of Education.
Brannan noted that the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) also used a relatively cautious estimate of city revenues to justify those cuts rather than revising those estimates as the city continues its recovery.
OMB Director Jiha emphasized that the city’s recovery has been “mixed” and that there are several challenges ahead even with certain positive trends. Revenues have been higher than anticipated because of a booming stock market and better than expected personal income taxes, while retail and residential sales have rebounded.
But, the city has not recovered jobs as fast as the national average and unemployment remains at 9%, compared to 4% nationally. Industries like hospitality and tourism are bouncing back much more slowly, and the rate of employees returning to workplaces was hobbled by the Omicron surge. Office vacancy rates are reported to be almost 20%, the highest in decades. “Given these uncertainties, the administration took a cautious and pragmatic approach to the preliminary budget,” Jiha said.
He also pointed to risks stemming from the state budget, including a proposed permanent extension of the yearly $200 million Sales Tax Intercept for the Distressed Hospitals Fund, which has already sapped $400 million from the city, and another almost $300 million in cuts and cost shifts from other sources.
A chief concern for most Council members was the administration’s plan for continuing programs that are currently being funded with one-time federal funds. As Speaker Adams noted, between the 2022 and 2025 fiscal years, federal funds support $6.8 billion in new programs and $762 million in PEG restorations, nearly half of which goes to three city entities – the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Health + Hospitals, and the Department of Education.
“We are currently looking closely at every single one of the programs that was created as part of the recovery and we are assessing the future,” Jiha said. “If we deem it appropriate to continue the program after federal funding lapses, we will make the appropriate adjustments in the budget.” Jiha also said the administration expects city revenues to slowly bounce back by the time federal funds run out, allowing them to swap those rebounding revenues in their place.
Jiha faced several questions about the city’s PEG program, particularly the decision to cut 7,000 positions across roughly 40 city agencies — either existing vacancies that will not be filled or not filling upcoming ones as city employees find work elsewhere, retire, or otherwise depart. One after the other, Council members expressed concerns that cutting headcounts would affect services and programs whether it concerned school safety agents, firefighters, NYPD civilian positions, homeless services and housing programs, the buildings department, transportation department, mental health services, sanitation services, and more. But Jiha repeatedly emphasized that the administration made no layoffs and only sought to “right-size” agencies by reducing vacancies without leading to service interruptions.
“Even though we reduced vacancies, all the agencies continue to have vacancies,” he said. “Our goal is to work with them to make sure that they could backfill those positions. And if they manage to backfill those positions, and if they need additional resources at that time, we will have discussions with them to see if they need new resources to meet their mission.”
The mayor’s preliminary budget eliminated $500 million in projected labor savings that the de Blasio administration had budgeted but never explained how to achieve. But some Council members nevertheless pressed Jiha on whether labor savings may still be on the table, particularly as the administration negotiates municipal union contracts that are expiring.
“Is this administration actively negotiating with the unions to find budget savings and if so, has there been progress from these negotiations?,” asked Brannan.
Jiha and First Deputy Budget Director Kenneth Godiner said discussions with labor unions are in the works, particularly around health care costs. “Those talks are ongoing and as we move into contract negotiations, I'm certain that savings will be part of those discussions as well,” Godiner said.
“We have not identified a set labor savings target, but that will be a product of our negotiations between ourselves and our union partners,” he added.
To many Council member requests, Jiha offered congeniality and cooperation, but few definitive commitments. He promised at several points that the budget would be adjusted according to assessments of needs and the funding available to the city. He stressed, as Mayor Adams has, that this is only a preliminary budget plan and the administration crafted it only weeks into the new administration (Jiha is a holdover from de Blasio’s tenure).
Speaker Adams and Council Member Amanda Farias, a Bronx Democrat, asked about the administration’s plan for seniors, noting that the preliminary budget included no new investments in senior services. “This is a journey. The preliminary budget is the first step in that journey,” Jiha told the speaker. “And as we go forward and we would want an assessment that there is a need, we will try to accommodate it as long as there is the necessary resources available for us to do so.”
Council Members Ari Kagan, a Brooklyn Democrat, and David Carr, a Staten Island Republican, questioned Jiha about the high vacancy rates among school safety agents, with Carr suggesting greater compensation to reduce turnover. Jiha again said there continue to be sufficient vacancies and that any additional need would have to be evaluated when the time comes for it.
Council Member Julie Won, a Queens Democrat, asked for improvements to city procurement and contracting, which has been perennially beset with delays that lead to late payments of city contractors. “From my perspective, there is a need to overhaul the system,” Jiha said in response, promising to work with the Council and comptroller’s office on reforms to the system, some of which were recently promised via the results of a joint task force assembled by Mayor Adams and Comptroller Brad Lander.
Council Member Nantasha Williams, a Queens Democrat, pushed the administration to expedite appointments at the city Commission on Human Rights, citing the rise in hate crimes and discriminatory harassment in the city. She noted that there are 45 vacancies out of the commission’s 154 budgeted positions. “If they have a need and come our way, we would expedite them as quickly as possible so that they have the resources to deal with issues related to hate crime,” Jiha said.
The only Council member who expressed overt displeasure with the administration was Charles Barron, a Brooklyn Democrat. He worried that cuts would come at the cost of Council initiatives, which amount to about $300 million in the budget. “Don't let them turn this into a budget dance just for our initiatives,” he said to his colleagues. “$300 million is petty. If you get that back. You did not have a successful budget negotiation. This is a $98 billion budget. Let's stay focused on poverty.”
In his testimony on Tuesday, Comptroller Lander, a Democrat, noted the various challenges the city faces but was optimistic about the city’s recovery. He forecasted that city revenues will in fact surpass OMB’s projections by about $1.4 billion in the current fiscal year and $800 million in fiscal year 2023. “We face great risks and uncertainties – Russia’s war on Ukraine, inflation, federal monetary policy, climate change – but the indicators point uniformly to an ongoing recovery over the coming year,” he said.
Lander praised the administration for finding recurring savings through the PEG. But he also said the city has perpetually under budgeted certain expenses such as overtime, homeless shelters, rental assistance, and for placing special needs students in private schools (Carter cases), and that the expiration of federal funds will create several fiscal cliffs for the city.
Lander specifically pointed to overtime as an out-of-control cost, projecting it will be above budget by $431 million this year and $348 million in FY 2023. And he noted that the administration has not factored in the cost of wage increases for municipal workers as all municipal labor contracts are set to expire.
Lander also called on the administration to increase the amount of funds added to the city’s reserves, which are currently at an all time high raw amount of $6.1 billion but nowhere near what experts and watchdogs say it should be, which is roughly 12-15% of operating expenses. “We are far below the budget cushion we need to weather the next fiscal downturn, and the budget includes no plan to get there,” he said. “It remains urgent to codify regular deposits into the Rainy-Day Fund year-over-year.”
The Independent Budget Office, a nonpartisan city agency, also projected that surplus revenues will be higher than OMB expects. In an analysis of the preliminary budget, IBO stated that the city is on “a slow but sustained pathway toward economic recovery.” But, the agency also acknowledged the many challenges the city faces. “[T]he unpredictability of the virus, combined with recent geopolitical instability, result in an economic forecast that is characterized by a disproportionate share of downside risks,” the analysis reads.
Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit watchdog, similarly called for continuing a PEG in the next budget, plans for avoiding fiscal cliffs, and annual deposits in the Rainy Day Fund.
“Streamlining and improving City services is critically important to ensure effective use of taxpayer resources and high-quality services for residents and businesses,” said Ana Champeny, CBC’s deputy research director, in her testimony. Though she praised the PEG initiative, she noted that most of the savings came from eliminating vacancies and re-estimating spending rather than more operational efficiencies.
After the initial broad hearing on the mayor’s budget plan, the Council will now move into weeks of hearings examining the budgets of specific agencies. Brannan, as finance chair, will co-chair all of them, along with Council members who chair specific committees, such as education, sanitation, health, and many more.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Comptroller Lander Launches Tracker for City Spending of $11 Billion in Federal Pandemic Aid
Comptroller Brad Lander, standing (photo: Office of New York City Comptroller)
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander on Tuesday unveiled an online dashboard tracking how the city is spending and allocating more than $11 billion in federal stimulus funds. Lander pointed to several deficiencies in the city’s accounting of those funds, with unclear links between the source of funding and expenditures and sparse measures of the outcomes of that spending. He is hoping to work with fellow Democrat Mayor Eric Adams on addressing these issues left behind by the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio.
The city and its residents are expected to receive as much as $26 billion through the 2026 fiscal year in various forms of direct and indirect federal aid including stimulus checks, unemployment insurance, and federal grants, among others. Lander’s tracker examines city spending starting in the 2023 fiscal year as proposed under Adams’ $98.5 billion preliminary budget proposal for the fiscal year set to begin July 1.
The tracker looks at $11 billion in stimulus funds being spent by New York City government, including about $4 billion in direct aid to the city through the State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) program and $7 billion from the Education Stabilization Fund awarded in several rounds of stimulus programs earmarked for schools and students. It doesn’t analyze other pots of stimulus funding including more than $7.6 billion in FEMA reimbursements for health care and hospital costs and nearly $2 billion from the federal Coronavirus Relief Fund.
The city received $5.9 billion in SLFRF funds, which were allocated across five years in the budget adopted in June 2021, with $1.81 billion to be spent in fiscal year 2021, $3.11 billion in FY 2022, $288 million in FY 2023, $226 million in FY 2024, and $452 million in FY 2025.
In September, as mandated by federal stimulus law, de Blasio’s administration released an initial accounting of that spending and plans for additional expenditures of the funds. More than $3.2 billion from those funds were meant to replace lost revenue for the city to keep services continuing; $1.2 billion went towards addressing the “negative economic impact” of the pandemic, $1.1 billion towards public health, and $277 million for services for communities that were disproportionately impacted.
[Read: De Blasio Outlines Spending Plan for $5.9 Billion in Direct Federal Pandemic Aid]
But the city’s reporting has “significant limitations” and lacks transparency and accountability, Lander said Tuesday. Funding sources were commingled, making it hard to connect them directly with expenditures. For instance, the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget outlined $1.26 billion in SLFRF spending in fiscal year 2021, but Lander said his office could independently verify only $520 million of that amount while another $318 million remained unaccounted for. “There were some real accounting problems here,” he said in reference to early filings by the de Blasio administration.
Lander did acknowledge that the city’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had improved on the practice of fund accounting, directly relating funds with spending, but that there’s much more work to be done. He pointed to spending categories that were far too broad to determine which funds were being used for what purposes. “It’s so in the accounting weeds but it matters in dollars and cents to how the city gets reimbursed and how we report,” he said. And it also matters in terms of tracking results.
The city has failed to produce metrics linking spending with outcomes, Lander said, even though nearly half the spending has gone out the door. Though the federally required report from the city contained planned performance metrics, none have been published so far. “This is the moment when we need to be making decisions about whether we're spending the money in the right way and if we aren't, to switch how we’re budgeting it,” Lander said.
He cited several examples. For instance, while the city allocated $121 million for rental assistance in the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, it has not reported on how many households received a rental assistance voucher. Another $725 million went to school facilities to deal with pandemic-related issues, but there is no clear measure of how much of that funding was spent on improving ventilation in schools. About $271 million was spent on 'learning loss' programs to help students recover from the effects of the pandemic, but there isn’t data to judge the success of those initiatives.
“We don't know what's working. We don't know how to direct it more in the direction of what is or do less of what isn't,” Lander said. “So that is one real shortcoming. We're not able to show you performance metrics because none have been published yet.”
The comptroller struck an additional note of caution about monitoring expenses, pointing to ‘fiscal cliffs’ the city will face in initially funding recurring programs with one-time federal funds. De Blasio put into motion an expansion of his program to provide free kindergarten for all three-year-olds, which Lander noted could face a $376 million shortfall in FY 2026. The city will also have to come up with $111 million in FY 2025 and $235 million in FY 2026 to continue funding expanded special education pre-kindergarten, mental health services and community schools programs. De Blasio was asked repeatedly about using one-time aid for recurring programming before leaving office and said that the Adams administration would likely find ways to fund important ongoing programs
Lander has acknowledged with some hope that Mayor Adams has pledged to focus on outcomes, transparency, and data-metrics, and even publicly invited the comptroller’s oversight. "The federal stimulus funding New York City received was a needed lifeline, helping to jump-start our recovery and avoid cuts to vital programs that protect the health and wellbeing of people across our city," said an Adams spokesperson, in a statement. "We share the comptroller’s commitment to tracking how these dollars are being used. We will be rolling out a tracker very soon to build on our public reporting of this data, focusing on accessibility and transparency."
Lander’s tracker isn’t the first or only attempt at scrutinizing federal stimulus expenditure. At the state level, Comptroller Tom DiNapoli has already released his own tracker, which is updated every month. The New York City Independent Budget Office, a nonpartisan city agency, also published an online tool that delves into individual city agencies as well.
[Listen: Max Politics Podcast: Comptroller Brad Lander on the City Budget, Nonprofit Contracting, & More]
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
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