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21bkpandp2

Thanks for being with us on this edition of Power in Politics on News 12. I'm Amanda Bossert, and this week, New York City Comptroller Mark Levine released the first annual report of his tenure in his new role, and it revealed some disparities when it comes to city contracts and who they're awarded to. He spoke exclusively with News Twelve's Heather Fordham about those findings and action that could be taken as a result. Comptroller, we're here today to talk about your first massive annual report. Tell me, uh, we, I just mentioned a 192 page report. How do we summarize that? Look, New York City contracts billions of dollars of work out every year to do things ranging from renovating a school to, um, providing marketing services and so much more. And it's really important that the people who get those contracts reflect the diversity of New York City. And historically, they have not. Women and people of color have been dramatically underrepresented in who gets those contracts, and we want to fix that. And we're making an effort to track our progress, how are we're doing in awarding contracts to what are known as MWBEs, minority Women Business Enterprises. And this is a report that my office has done every year now for several years. It's a big undertaking. We go into detail in every single agency of city government. To really analyze the numbers and I'm really thrilled now that we're debuting the report. This is my first interview on the topic, uh, to put a marker down on how we're doing, and I'm happy to talk about that. So one of the key takeaways from that report is that, uh, just about 5% of minority and women owned businesses of the city's $46 billion in contracts. Why is that number so low? Look, uh, how you slice the numbers is a little bit complicated. Sometimes people say, well, we've got about 200,000 contracts and purchase orders every year. What percent are going to minority and women owned businesses? It's about 25%. Turns out though that it's much more meaningful to ask what percent of the actual funding because you could have a lot of very small contracts, which is indeed what is generally going to NWBEs. And there our calculation, our assessment is that only about 5%. Of those contracts are going to MWBEs. It's about $2.4 billion. That is trending up. The dollar amount, a few years out was only when we started to do this survey three or four years ago, only about $1.9 billion. So we are trending up and I want to give kudos to the team at the mayor's office who is working on this. But clearly we have a long, long way to go. And another data point was about 1 in 5 certified MWBEs got uh New York City work last year. What do you say to those business owners who might feel that they're being shut out despite having the qualifications to do the work? We've, we've got to do better, and it's true that just getting certified as an MWBE, while that is very important, is not enough because. Uh, only 22% of those who are certified are getting any work in a given year. So, we've got to broaden that out so that a greater portion of those businesses which are certified are actually getting contracts. But, um, We have a couple of ideas on how to do that. These tend to be very small firms, and they might not have the financing to take on a big contract. And so we do want the city to be a better partner through our small business services in helping to offer low interest financing and other support. So these businesses, which are small, some are startups, can actually take on bigger projects. I think we can do that and will do that. There's a problem that we have. Across city government, which is the delays on getting paid on contracts are terrible. They can be months or years. Now if you're a billion dollar company, you can probably handle that because you have the cash, but if you're a small business, those delays can put you into bankruptcy. And so we also are recommending that the city accelerate payment on the contracts so that Minority and women owned businesses can can take on this work. They can survive financially and compete for this work. You mentioned those delays. I believe in the report it was about more than half of those business, uh, those contracts, they get paid after the work already started. So is that money coming directly from. their pockets or or how are they kind of, because generally these are reimbursement contracts, so you go out there, you pay your staff, you pay for the materials, you pay rent if that's relevant, and then you file for reimbursement which might take months and even years. You've already paid out. So you've got as a business to float sometimes millions of dollars in expenses. Again, if you're a large business, multi-million-dollar or billion-dollar even construction company, you can handle that. But I talked to smaller contractors who tell me I'm done working with the city because I can't handle the cash flow. I can't put it out up front, pay all my salaries, and then wait forever to get reimbursed by the city. That's terrible and it's particularly hitting small women and minority owned businesses. It's one of our top recommendations that the city has to fix so we can do better on this. Is there any particular agency that you're seeing kind of shut them out more than others? We actually did provide in the report, an agency by agency analysis and I'm actually not prepared to uh to uh give you that update right here, but the report does go into detail there. OK. How do you kind of fix this problem? What is one, you know, concrete, uh, plan that would be in place that, you know, in a year from now we're not back in the same boat? Yeah, um, first it's acknowledging the problem and tracking our progress. So that we understand we have a lot more work to do as a city, and that's why we do this report. So that we can have a conversation like you and I are having right now. Uh, secondly, So much of our work is going to be concentrated on helping small emerging startup women and minority businesses get in the game. They don't have a lot of capital because they're new, and we can as a city provide some of that capital through low interest loans. We can also offer coaching and other support through small business services to help them establish themselves. Next is making sure when they do get a contract that they are paid on time. So that, again, smaller businesses can operate. And as I mentioned before, we want to make sure that we don't just keep going back to that same 22% of MWBs that we broaden it out to reach more companies. I think we can do these things and we can move this number and we will be back next year to track our progress.

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21bkpandp3_2026-02-01-13-45-36

Welcome back as we return to our exclusive conversation with City Comptroller Mark Levine talking budget with News Twelve's Heather Fordham. And now I would be remiss to not ask about the budget. Uh, yesterday the mayor did have, um, his whole PowerPoint presentation, uh, that he called the Adams budget crisis. He says he doesn't want to make any cuts to city services. Uh, he's still pushing the tax on the rich. However, the governor is not really backing that plan right now. Um, do you think there is a way to fill that gap by February 17th that would come without making budget cuts? This is a big gap. This is a serious problem. I don't think it's a catastrophe. I think we can solve this if we're smart about it. We have some good news in that Wall Street is performing very well, and we had a very big bonus season in December, and our tax receipts are actually up this year, and I think that's going to continue. So there is some good news. The gap is big enough that we can't just rely on Wall Street here. We are going to have to be smarter about our budgeting. We're going to have to be honest about some programs which are growing very fast and aren't accounted for in the budget. And yeah, we're probably going to have to find, I won't say probably, we're definitely going to have to find some cost savings and curtail some programs. That's never easy, but I think we can do this in a way that is smart, which can bend the curve on growth in some of these programs and doesn't really harm services provided to the city. And we also want help from Albany, but I think before we ask for that help, we have to make sure that we are doing our part to manage the budget better from a city government perspective. So there may likely have to be cuts. Look, I think we're going to have to at least rein in some of our spending. And particularly for very fast growing areas, we have a housing voucher program known as City FEPPS. It's currently growing by 4% per month. That's not sustainable. So we're going to have to slow that growth down some. I think we can do it in a way that still meets the needs of the families that are so desperate for help in getting housing. We have a very large budget for our schools, even though enrollment in the schools has been falling down about 100,000 students. In the last 5 years, and I think there's some smart ways we can curtail expenses in our schools that won't harm students, won't harm teachers, but still could extract savings. I'm going to be talking more about this in the days ahead, but those are some areas which I think are ripe for savings, and we need to do that work quick. It's budget season now. The mayor his budget plan is due on February 17th, not that far away. The state's budget is due on April 1st, so this is game time now. We've got to make big decisions. I think if we do this, if we're brave enough and smart enough, we can stem off what would be a much bigger problem if we just kicked the can down the road. And that is all this week on Power and Politics right here on News 12. Thanks for watching.

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Council Member Kayla Santosuosso and state Sen. Andrew Gournardes join the show this week. 

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