Where the City of New York can — and should — do more, regardless of what happens in November
The job of mayor is not just about laying out grand visions; it’s about improving operations to make New York’s government work better. As Mayor Zohran Mamdani noted in his 100-day speech, a leader’s governing philosophy “can only be judged by its delivery.” Just Fix It is Vital City’s running look at concrete, nonideological ways to unstick the gears of city government and make it work better for all New Yorkers.
Last month, after hearing testimony from hundreds of New Yorkers, the administration’s Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE) approved five ballot amendments to the City Charter for voters to decide on in November. They include accelerating timelines for street safety projects and outdoor dining, improving the lengthy procurement process, consolidating the maze of permitting for construction and setting a savings target for the City’s rainy day fund. Vital City summarized the ideas with a simple message: good, but keep going.
Although altering the Charter is one way to make government work better, the City has the ability, every day, to make changes in operations big and small that will significantly improve city life.
This column puts forward thirteen fixes where the City of New York can — and should — do more, regardless of what happens in November.
Ensure government delivers results that matter.
The problem: With a $125.8 billion budget and more than 300,000 employees, the New York City government affects every aspect of residents’ lives. But the City rarely asks itself the “How’m I doin’?” question made famous by Mayor Ed Koch and then figures out how to do better. How could the City focus agencies on results and not just activity?
Response 1: The Mayor’s Office of Operations (MOO), which is charged with measuring the impact of City agencies’ work, produces a report each quarter that contains thousands of indicators. It should refocus on a narrower group of results that matter, and then use those metrics to drive performance.
The fine print: Each year since 1977, the Mayor’s Office has released a scorecard of how the city is doing, otherwise known as the Mayor’s Management Report (MMR). Its scope is unparalleled, but over time agencies have come to report mostly routine activities they undertake: how many arrests they made, how many young people they placed in summer jobs, how many trees they pruned. As seasoned municipal leaders have pointed out, the MMR fails to document many key results for actual New Yorkers: What share of crimes did those arrests clear? Did those summer jobs keep young people employed and safe? Are those tree-lined streets cooler and more walkable? Indicators that do not allow the City to make better decisions do not represent accountability, just more paperwork.
Experts convened by Vital City suggested concrete ways to improve this ecosystem of accountability. First, consistently measure results rather than activity. Second, reduce the number of indicators reported by each agency from the 100or more that some now track to just a couple dozen. And third, find ways to get City Hall to pay more attention to the indicators and more meaningfully involve MOO in governance, so that the feedback it provides about outcomes plays directly into further decisionmaking. According to the former City Planning chair Carl Weisbrod, the MMR “should be used for goal setting (not just for measuring what has happened).” And that means MOO needs to be working closely with City agencies to set and meet those goals.
Response 2: The Mayor’s Office of Contract Services (MOCS), which oversees how agencies award and manage contracts, should publish all contracts above a certain size.
The fine print: Each year, the City pays roughly $40 billion to outside vendors for providing goods, performing services and constructing facilities. These contractors play an essential role but can also be the source of cost overruns or corruption. The City already publishes notices of contract awards above $100,000 in the City Record — but a notice lists little more than the vendor, the dollar amount and a one-line purpose. The contract itself — its scope, its pricing, what the vendor actually promised to deliver, what neighborhood would receive the services — is not typically published; getting a copy of a contract could require a records request that takes months, or an in-person visit to inspect a paper copy. MOCS, whose PASSPort system already holds every agency’s contract documents, should post any contract above a reasonable dollar threshold. That way, New Yorkers can know who their government is doing business with, how performance is being measured (if it is being measured at all) and what’s at stake.
Streamline and strengthen the structure and process of government.
The problem: Today’s government is loaded up with layer upon layer of responsibilities and requirements that inevitably reflect decades of past initiatives — and there is rarely an opportunity to step back and ask: Is this still necessary? The Fire Department still maintains thousands of street-corner pull boxes, and its efforts to retire the 19th-century technology have been blocked by the courts. A Tammany-era anti-graft measure still forces public construction projects above a certain size to hire four separate prime contractors instead of one, inflating costs and delays.
Response 1: The City should launch a quadrennial review of each agency’s capacity to deliver.
The fine print: Each successive mayoral administration inherits some of its predecessor’s projects and spending priorities, deciding what to cut and keep. That’s an opportunity to assess whether past commitments can or should be met given the agencies’ own resources and capacities. Every four years, the City should examine the operating capacity of each agency to carry out policies — through their procurement processes, hiring practices, technology or capital projects — and then, in the words of former First Deputy Mayor (among many other roles) Maria Torres-Springer, “own the plans to close the gaps.” Programs established in law can’t easily be discarded by the executive branch, but many others can and should be routinely reassessed.
Response 2: The Mayor’s Office of Operations should review offices and agencies for consolidation.
The fine print: It is common for mayoral administrations to reshuffle or create entirely new offices and departments, frequently to show that they’re paying sufficient attention to a given issue, but this proliferation can weaken regulatory cohesion and agency accountability. The City now has an Office of Urban Agriculture, an Office of Nightlife, an Office of Sports, Wellness and Recreation, and an Office of Marine Debris Disposal and Vessel Surrendering — each created for a reason, and each another box on an organizational chart that few New Yorkers, or even City workers, can navigate. (Indeed, those who seek to find City government’s org chart online are met — as of publication — with a message: “The New York City Organizational Chart is being revised. Please check back later.”) MOO should regularly review the City’s organizational chart to identify opportunities to consolidate overlapping and duplicative structures. Where agencies and offices can be eliminated by the executive without legislative action, that should happen swiftly. Where action by the City Council or state Legislature is needed, the Mamdani administration should press to make that happen. And the org chart should be publicly available.
Response 3: The mayor should revive the dormant commission that exists to kill needless reports.
The fine print: According to a recent analysis by Tal Roded, the creator of the NYCuriosity substack, the City’s own records list 2,231 separate reporting requirements spread across 183 agencies — and nearly half have no record of ever having been filed. Year after year, the pile only grows: An independent tracker of Council legislation counts more than 5,000 standing obligations imposed on agencies since 2014, including roughly 67 new recurring reports every year, none of which expire unless the Council repeals them. The tool already exists: A Charter-created Report and Advisory Board Review Commission — composed of the Council speaker, two council members and four mayoral officials — can waive obsolete reporting requirements, subject to the Council’s veto (so even mandates they’ve previously imposed can be retired). But since RABRC’s creation in 2010, it has only eliminated 28 reports — while local laws have required or revised over 1,500. And despite the fact that the commission is required to hold a public hearing every year, it hasn’t convened since December 2024. COGE itself found that City agencies spend more than 125,000 staff hours each year on reports and recommended eliminating duplicative requirements, but did not address them through its ballot proposals. City Hall should require every agency to submit its full list of required reports each year, with an account of how each informs decisions; the Mayor’s Office of Operations should then compile the evidence showing which are vestigial, beginning with the hundreds that never appear to have been filed; and the commission should do the culling it has already been assigned.
Response 4: The Mayor’s Office of Contract Services should review the multiple routine processes that exist across many agencies for contract review and execution to identify reasonable time savings.
The fine print: The City often operates on timelines set by rule rather than by best practice or common sense. COGE itself found that the median solicitation remains open for 50 days, agency evaluations take another 130 days and oversight approvals add another 100 days, all before a contract reaches the City Comptroller, who has 30 days to register or object. Almost none of these timelines are fixed in law and are instead the result of the City’s own rules and habits. The result is that more than 80% of the contracts registered in fiscal year 2024 arrived after their start dates had already passed. One of COGE’s ballot proposals begins to fix this by trimming pre-contracting paperwork, allowing the mayor to delegate contract approvals and replacing a mandatory hearing with a comment period. But City Hall shouldn’t stop there. MOCS already runs a yearly push to get contracts registered on time, and City Hall should review every stage’s timeline, build a dashboard to clock every contract and make it a public target to end retroactive registration altogether.
Improve how government spends money to get better results.
The problem: Mayor Mamdani has an expansive and expensive agenda, yet the City’s fiscal future looks fragile. In coming years, this tension will put pressure on City Hall, which now oversees a $125.8 billion budget, to become more efficient in its use of taxpayer dollars if it wants to achieve signature goals, like delivering universal childcare (credibly estimated to cost $9 billion annually) or eliminating fares on buses (which the Independent Budget Office estimates would cost $1.1 billion a year). The administration’s designation of chief savings officers at each agency was a good first step, but it needs to go further.
Response 1: The Mayor’s Office of Contract Services should make paying for results standard practice.
The fine print: The City pays outside vendors roughly $40 billion a year for everything from homeless shelters to mental health programs, yet contracts are typically for activities performed, not results achieved. With so much of government contracted out, this creates an accountability problem: The City does not have a systematic way of knowing whether contracted services are working and can neither correct failures nor replicate successes. There are exceptions. The City itself launched the nation’s first “social impact bond,” a 2012 effort to cut recidivism at Rikers Island with an elaborate financing contraption. (It missed its targets and cost taxpayers nothing.) And the Human Resources Administration, the City’s main social services agency, has long paid its employment vendors based partly on job placements and retention. Other cities are building on that practice. Denver, for example, now ties payment for supportive housing to verified results such as fewer days in jail. MOCS, which manages and regulates City contracts from City Hall, should launch a yearlong pilot embedding performance-based payment in a set of contracts in areas that the administration is prioritizing, like mental health response or violence interrupters, with the goal of making it a standard practice rather than a boutique experiment.
Response 2: Albany should grant capital agencies the freedoms that the City’s fastest builders already have.
The fine print: When New York City wants something built fast, it goes around its own rules. In the late 1980s, school construction was bogged down by the State’s Wicks Law, which forces public projects to hire and coordinate separate contractors for plumbing, heating and electrical work, rather than contracting with one builder. So the State created the School Construction Authority (SCA) as a public benefit corporation and exempted it from Wicks and the usual lowest-bid statutes, allowing the SCA to prequalify builders, award single contracts and hire outside the civil service system. Similarly, the City formed the Economic Development Corporation (EDC) in 1991 as a nonprofit to build on the City’s behalf, outside its procurement rulebook. That contrasts with the Department of Design and Construction, a City agency created in 1996 to unify construction for the transportation, environmental and general services departments but still subject to every constraint. Consolidation without freedom didn’t deliver speed. Former transportation commissioner Polly Trottenberg has suggested extending the procurement and hiring powers of an EDC or SCA to the agencies that carry out the City’s capital budget — a change that would require Albany’s assent. Yale Law School professor David Schleicher has suggested going further and pulling all construction into a single off-budget, mayor-controlled entity. While neither idea could happen quickly, both deserve serious study.
Lift barriers to using and improving the public realm.
The problem: New York City oversees a vast public realm — the Parks Department alone stewards more than 30,000 acres, 14% of the city’s land — but has never fully funded its upkeep. A web of outside partners has filled the gap: at least 6,000 volunteer “friends of” groups, block associations, conservancies and other nonprofits. Their admirable work is distributed unevenly across the city, however, exacerbating inequities. The City compounds the imbalance with rules that make it difficult for these partners to raise revenue, mount programming or even tidy up.
Response 1: The Office of Management and Budget should fund the upkeep of what the City builds.
The fine print: The deepest reason the public realm decays is structural: The City budgets to build new parks, plazas and recreation centers, but the dollars to clean, prune and repair them — drawn from the scarcest budget lines — often never follow. The Charter already requires the executive capital budget to state the likely impact that staffing, maintaining and operating each capital project will have on the expense budget. But no rule requires the budget to actually carry those costs. OMB should close the loop by baselining every approved project's maintenance estimate in the financial plan, so the dollars are in place the day the ribbon is cut — and the Council should lock the practice in by requiring an annual public reconciliation of maintenance estimates against dollars actually funded.
Response 2: The mayor should pare back the rules that keep concessions out of public spaces.
The fine print: Concessions — the cafes, kiosks, markets and boat rentals that operate on public land — are among the main ways public spaces come alive, and among the few ways they generate revenue for their own upkeep. Yet spaces where concessions could thrive too often sit empty because of onerous requirements, most imposed decades ago as the City moved to shed liability and cost after the 1970s fiscal crisis. There is no playbook for applying for a concession; license terms let the City terminate at will, which scares off lenders; and operators are expected to shoulder capital repairs on deteriorating properties. Those burdens have narrowed the pool of willing applicants to a few well-resourced operators, perpetuating the same dynamic that squeezes the volunteer groups and small nonprofits that steward these spaces, leaving poorer neighborhoods with the least. That means less foot traffic, fewer amenities and less revenue for the City. Approvals run through the Franchise and Concession Review Committee, a little-known panel chaired and controlled by the mayor. The mayor should direct it, with input from the private sector, to review and pare back the requirements that pose the biggest barriers to entry, benchmarking against public landlords that lease space under nimbler rules of their own. The nonprofit EDC already rents out City-owned piers, markets and industrial buildings under its own streamlined guidelines rather than the City’s rulebook, and it’s been a huge success, reviving spaces that had been underutilized for years. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority runs a program that licenses vacant subway retail spaces rent-free and has recently turned long-shuttered newsstands into art installations and puppet theaters.
Response 3: The Office of Management and Budget should allow agencies to keep a portion of revenue when activities affect maintenance.
The fine print: When a concert, street fair, film shoot or concession generates rent or fees on public property, the money does not stay with the agency that manages the space, but rather flows to the City’s General Fund, to be divided up during budget season. This practice stems from a century-old charter rule that was entrenched by the 1970s fiscal crisis. The result is a perverse incentive: An agency that welcomes a revenue-generating activity pays for the wear and tear and the cleanup out of its own budget, while every dollar generated by the activity goes elsewhere. There is a better way: Private nonprofits that manage certain parks under special agreements with the City, such as the Central Park Conservancy, are permitted to keep a share of the concession revenue their parks generate and plow it back into upkeep. City Hall should direct OMB to fix this for everyone else. When private activity on an agency’s property generates rent or fees, the agency should retain a slice sufficient to cover the maintenance that activity requires.
Implement innovative hiring practices so government can recruit the right talent at fair pay.
The problem: New York City has a staffing problem. It can take City agencies months, if not years, to follow the procedures laid out by the archaic civil service rules that are required to bring on new applicants. Too often, talented applicants grow tired of waiting and seek out jobs in the private sector instead. The crunch is sharpest in sectors like technology, where the City can take a year to make a certified offer, while a university or startup hires within a few months. This helps drive up vacancy rates, which then plug up project delivery. And the brain drain deepens the City’s reliance on outside consultants, at several times the cost of in-house talent. Public service requirements are largely dictated by Albany, so the City needs creative ways to more quickly attract and retain talent.
Response 1: City Hall should launch a tour-of-service technology fellowship.
The fine print: Not every talented technologist or manager wants a career in government — but many would give it two or three years. Since 2024, with money from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Cornell Tech has embedded a handful of mid-career Urban Innovation Fellows inside City agencies for two-year tours, during which the fellows work on everything from housing to sanitation to procurement. The City should scale this and formalize it, recruiting people with skills it cannot secure through permanent hiring, at market speed, while seeding a bench of people who understand how the government actually works.
Response 2: The Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), which runs the City’s civil service system, should align recruitment strategies with skills gaps.
The fine print: The share of an agency’s positions that are vacant may reflect the agency’s inability to keep up with private-sector hiring practices. Often, the qualifications and skill sets required of public-sector applicants are out of sync with current training programs or private-sector hiring practices. For example, well-paying urban forestry positions at the Parks Department may be out of reach for applicants without proper certifications, while private-sector competitors often have flexible apprenticeship and training programs. DCAS should launch an effort to modernize job titles and position descriptions and update recruitment strategies so they keep pace with the job market. Meanwhile, the City should continue to pursue broad civil service law changes in Albany to reform its hidebound hiring system.
