2026 NYC Election Ballot Proposals: What I Think And Why

Proposal 2: “Reform the Contracting Process to Improve Small Business and Nonprofit Opportunities to Work with the City”: Yes, but follow up

[waiting while you read Donaldson & Wilson’s summary and Bill Bruno’s analysis]

(I base a lot of what follows on text from the Charter revision commission's full report.)

“Procurement” means the city buying goods and services. The last big reform of procurement was after some big corruption scandals in 1989. So that established

"the Procurement Policy Board (PPB), which was given responsibility to establish rules and policies for procurement but not have involvement in the procurement process itself. The Charter also included a requirement for public hearings on certain contract awards." (p. 37)

Currently, there is no rule for how often they have to meet, so they meet inconsistently, leading to issues; people are waiting on stuff from them!

Also, when you think “the city buying goods and services,” you may imagine a contractor in a hard hat with a pipe on his shoulder, about to install it into a water system. Yes, that’s part of it. But this is not just businesses! The city hires a ton of nonprofits to provide lots of services -- outreach, health care, education, and more. So, also imagine someone running a daycare, or handing out flyers.

Right now, the whole procurement process moves very slowly, all the way from the start to the end. It takes forever to get the official request for proposals posted, and then it takes forever for applicants to fill out the application forms (and it's the same giant form no matter how big or small you are, so small businesses have to waste a lot of time answering stuff that doesn't make sense for them). Then sometimes the solicitation has to be kept posted for an absurd amount of time before closing. Then there’s how long it takes to evaluate proposals and revise them; I spoke with one dude who in particular lamented waiting months for a review, then got told “here are the issues, you have 5 days to fix them” and had to scramble.

Then there’s how long it takes to start getting paid! In my consulting work, "net 30" is standard, which means: as I start doing work, I invoice the client, and they’re supposed to pay me within 30 days of receiving the invoice. Under the current system, New York City’s contractors have to wait so long to get paid that they often have to take out loans to cover their financial gaps while they await payment. This is absolutely awful.

This is not news to anyone involved. The Commission heard a bunch of testimony, and talked with City agencies, which are in fact already in the midst of implementing some improvements (more details in p. 20 and pp. 82-84 of the Commission’s final report). (Spurring and publicizing those kinds of changes: one of the good things about the current charter revision process.) But also the Commission proposes to change basically four things:

1. "Public Notice: To speed up in the procurement process, the Commission proposes to make permanent a public comment period instead of a public hearing for contract awards" -- so, people would write in with comments, instead of having to go to live hearings. Also, public notice requirements would get more flexible in a specific way that tickles me. To quote the legal text of the change: "the value of which exceeds [one hundred thousand dollars -- removed & replaced with] an amount determined by rule of the procurement policy board". This  reminds me of the bit in the Seventh Amendment saying “where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars”; I can get why the Framers put that in the Bill of Rights, but any hardcoded constant in a grand aspirational document always strikes me as a break in tone.
2. “Delegation of Approvals": Right now, the Charter says that for certain procurements, THE MAYOR'S APPROVAL is required, and he is not allowed to delegate to the a city agency’s chief contracting officer. Evidently this is a significant bottleneck. This would change so that (quoting the Commission’s ballot question “abstract” summary): "authority to approve contracts that are worth more than $5 million and are awarded by a method other than competitive bidding to Agency Chief Contracting Officers, with the approval of the agency’s Commissioner".
3. Regular Procurement Policy Board meetings: They’d be required to meet at least quarterly. The Commission heard that this is necessary - there is work for them to do!
4. "Eliminate unnecessary reporting to free up staff time to work on substantive reviews” has this change to how agencies make and publish their “Client Services Plans” (quoting p. 63-64 of the Commission’s final report):

The Charter requires agencies that award client services contracts to annually produce a draft and final plan detailing anticipated contracting actions for the fiscal year and hold at least one public hearing each year following release of the plan. The multiple drafts and requirement for public hearings, which have little to no attendance, create duplicative work for agencies, take time and resources away from their primary responsibilities, and do not provide a meaningful opportunity for the public to engage. To save hundreds of hours of staff time, COGE proposes to revise these provisions to authorize the publication of the report without the need to first publish a draft report and hold a public hearing.

Basically: is the current process actually providing meaningful oversight?? If not, let’s simplify it.

So the core question here is: how much do you think the current procurement safeguards meaningfully protect our city government’s processes from corrupt or incompetent administration, or individual corrupt or incompetent executives at agencies? Is the frickin’ torture that small businesses and nonprofits go through to contract with the City serving enough of a purpose?

And: we will never get this completely right. The fastest possible way to set up contracts is a handshake deal. The more careful you get about cronyism, corruption, and fraud, the more you check stuff, the more you slow stuff down. The optimal amount of fraud, as Dan Davies has been reminding us for decades, is likely not zero; it’s not worth the trade-off, all the slowdowns and attrition you’d get from going from “very low amount” to “zero”. And we’ll likely never have a perfectly balanced procurement process that filters out only the corrupt incompetent cronies while whisking all the virtuous efficient contractors along swiftly.

But it does seem like a lot of groups think this proposal would be a good move, if marginal (“save small businesses dozens of hours of work per contract, ensure a 12% reduction of the City’s procurement timeline” from p. 37 of the final report). Example: NY Lawyers in the Public Interest. NYCVotes got many supporting statements and very few opposing ones on Proposal #2.

Scenario planning matters here. How likely is it that we have an Eric Adams-level cartoonishly corrupt administration in the near future? My personal assessment of the current mayoralty is that the guy at the top has integrity such that I’m not concerned about him initiating or allowing procurement corruption, so, barring huge catastrophe, the concern would start in 2030 or 2034 when the next mayor comes in. Which is long enough for us to iterate further if the pendulum’s swung too far. Bill assesses that this proposed system retains enough oversight and checks-and-balances for his liking in general, and observes that, if the corruption is coming from the top, the proposed systems isn’t very resilient to that, but the current system isn’t either.

Bill also notes: it’s way more slow and expensive to build and do things in NYC than in other parts of the US. This expense and time hurts our ability to deliver services!

Citizens Union says that Proposal #2 “will not overhaul the system” but “could improve it at the margins”,

"But there are risks. Specifically, we are concerned about the plan to give the administration, through the Procurement Policy Board, the authority to rewrite the questionnaire that new vendors must submit. The current questionnaire, whose exact questions are set by law, is long and burdensome and applies equally to all vendors, whether a major bank or a food stand. However, some questions help ensure vendor integrity, prevent corruption, or hold vendors accountable after potential violations. Officials at the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services (MOCS) assured Citizens Union that the agency shares our concern about vendor integrity and said it would work with other oversight agencies when developing the new questionnaire. If this measure passes, the Department of Investigation must be involved in this effort."

Makes sense to me.

My vote: yes, but followup.