Testimony of Chief Climate Officer Louise Yeung Before the New York City Council Committees on Transportation and Infrastructure and Resiliency and Waterfronts

Thank you to Chairs Brooks-Powers and Kagan for convening this important hearing, and for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Louise Yeung, the first Chief Climate Officer to serve at the City’s Office of the Comptroller.

New York City is at a crossroads. Our economy is still reeling from the impacts of the pandemic, with local unemployment at nearly twice the national rate. Nearly a decade after Superstorm Sandy and six months after Hurricane Ida, we have not done enough to prepare for future storms. Meanwhile, our decades-old infrastructure continues to age.

The recent passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) offers reason for hope as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to support our economic recovery, create good jobs, modernize our infrastructure systems, and build a more resilient, equitable, and well-functioning city that is ready for the storms to come.

But New York City needs to prepare now for this opportunity, both to maximize the federal funds we receive, and to maximize the benefits of the funds we get. That’s why we are so grateful to Chairs Brooks-Powers and Kagan, along with the Committees on Transportation & Infrastructure and Resiliency & Waterfronts, for convening this hearing today.

Comptroller Lander has long been a leading advocate for robust, strategic, and efficient infrastructure investments. After helping to bring participatory budgeting to NYC to give New Yorkers a say on local infrastructure projects, he created the first Council District-level capital projects tracking system so constituents could know the status of the projects they chose. This led him to pass legislation in 2020 requiring the City to create a comprehensive, citywide Capital Projects Tracker—a critical step toward increasing accountability and efficiency in how the City spends billions in taxpayer dollars.

Building on this work, the Comptroller’s office partnered with New York Senator and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to convene experts, advocates, and union leaders to discuss the opportunities presented by IIJA. From those conversations, we have developed the following set of principles and recommendations:

Principles for Prioritizing the Federal Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act (IIJA) Funding Opportunities

Advance shovel-ready projects now while simultaneously pursuing systemic reforms to capital project management and strategic infrastructure planning. Maximizing IIJA dollars requires proposing and implementing shovel-ready projects, and certainly there are many things we can do to bring swift improvements to NYC. Yet, we must balance that with broader reforms to our infrastructure planning and capital project management processes to improve the way we plan, design, procure, and construct infrastructure projects—or we will lose out on the opportunity for the IIJA to deliver the sweeping infrastructure improvements that our city needs.

We commend First Deputy Mayor Lorraine Grillo for taking on the challenging but much-needed task of reforming capital project management, to work with both City agencies and industry partners to deliver projects on-time and on-budget. By reducing time and cost, we can deliver far more and better infrastructure, both with IIJA funds and City capital far into the future. The Comptroller’s Office is excited to participate in that task force. We also believe it is necessary to strengthen the City’s infrastructure planning process, with a broad look at how we prioritize, evaluate, finance, and maintain our infrastructure in the long term.

Take a laser focus on climate justice. As the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy approaches this fall, we must use IIJA to the greatest extent possible to fund the kind of transformative sustainable and resilient infrastructure projects we need to address the climate crisis. Unfortunately, many categories of sustainability and resiliency investments were removed from the final bill, or were anticipated to be in Build Back Better. Nonetheless, this influx of federal capital provides an opportunity to take a climate justice lens to our spending to counteract decades of disinvestment in environmental justice communities. Our climate investments must be guided by data-driven climate planning, informed by our decarbonization plan to achieve 80% emissions reduction by 2050, as well as the climate risks facing our most vulnerable neighborhoods.

Make the most of every capital dollar by improving collaboration across agencies to maximize project co-benefits. The lion’s share of IIJA funds is for transportation: New York is expected to receive nearly $25 billion in formula funding for transportation projects, a 43% increase from last year. While road reconstruction is of course necessary in many places throughout the city, we need to rethink how our streetscape improvements for traffic safety and public realm activation above ground relate to stormwater absorption and conveyance below the surface to build a greener and more resilient city. We will need to review each project through a climate lens and blend IIJA dollars with City Capital funds to develop robust scopes that deliver multiple benefits. This approach requires an increased level of collaboration across agencies like the Departments of Transportation, Environmental Protection, and Parks and Recreation on strategic project scoping for formula and competitive funds alike.

Jumpstart an inclusive economic recovery by developing a proactive local hiring strategy that provides high-quality job opportunities for New Yorkers. The economic opportunity that the IIJA presents cannot be understated. IIJA was enacted to create millions of high-quality jobs with career pathways for American workers and to improve our nation’s ability to compete in emerging industries in the construction and physical and digital infrastructure markets. Thanks to the work and advocacy of Senator Schumer and Jobs to Move America, IIJA finally repealed the ban on local hire for federally funded contracts, representing a powerful first step towards ensuring New York City’s Black and Brown workers can directly benefit from these public funds. The City needs to develop targeted workforce initiatives to take full advantage of our new local hire capabilities.

Concrete Ideas for IIJA Implementation

With those principles in mind, we offer the following proposals for IIJA implementation:

Leverage every street reconstruction project to achieve climate and community benefits. Much IIJA funding will go for street reconstruction, but street reconstruction as usual is not enough. Fortunately, each project offers an opportunity to strategically leverage federal dollars to improve our streets with City capital dollars that can integrate green infrastructure, sewer reconstruction and expansion, cloudburst measures and other stormwater strategies, electrical vehicle charging, pedestrian and bike infrastructure, and other street safety measures and community benefits into the right-of-way. In fact, some new IIJA like the PROTECT and Healthy Streets Programs even explicitly call for street projects to incorporate broader resiliency benefits. This will call for greatly improved collaboration between DOT, DEP, and DDC. That collaboration needs to begin now, as projects are conceived, adapted, and designed.

Pilot a major local hiring effort in East Harlem, around the Second Avenue Subway extension. For the first time, IIJA allows community hiring to ensure that local residents benefit from projects in their communities. The next phase of the Second Avenue Subway presents a real opportunity to put this in practice. The leadership of WeACT for Environmental Justice and the coalition of East Harlem community groups provides a robust starting point for ensuring that New Yorkers can benefit directly from the influx in federal infrastructure dollars coming our way. Making that real requires building workforce development partnerships, outreach, and training programs now, so that residents are ready when construction begins. While the MTA will lead on the subway expansion, the City has a critical role to play in making workforce development and local hiring successful.

Launch a citywide “community climate corps” program. A new citywide “community climate corps” program would employ local residents to steward the new climate infrastructure we seek to build through the IIJA, providing a pathway to good jobs and delivering a Green New Deal for NYC. The expansion of our green infrastructure, parks, and public space network is critical to reaching our climate goals and making the most out of IIJA funds, but requires a new maintenance framework—one that that creates accessible jobs for New Yorkers to be stewards of the infrastructure in their own neighborhoods. Such a program can directly contract with local organizations to employ residents, particularly those with barriers to employment, to support the everyday maintenance activities needed to keep our infrastructure running smoothly. Those jobs will not only support employment and economic recovery while improving the City’s resilience, but will also help make the most of these IIJA funds by keeping the infrastructure we build in a state of good repair.

Get started on tracking now: In order to effectively leverage IIJA funds to jumpstart a just and inclusive economic recovery for residents, the City needs to set clear programmatic goals for these funds from the start, and publicly track progress in meeting those goals. The City must continue the excellent work it has already started to finish developing a public capital tracker. The City’s capital projects are notoriously over-budget and overtime, which may significantly constrain the benefits New York City can reap from these IIJA funds. In February 2020, Comptroller Lander passed legislation that requires the City to create a comprehensive, citywide Capital Project Tracker—a critical first step toward increasing accountability and efficiency in how the City spends billions in taxpayer dollars. That bill led to the formation of the “Unified Capital Projects Warehouse Task Force” that met consistently through 2021 to develop an impressive blueprint for completing a unified tracking system by the end of 2022. According to that blueprint, the work to develop that unified tracker should be well underway, but the City has yet to reconvene the Task Force, raising concerns about the administration’s prioritization of this effort. The City should reconvene the Task Force to ensure this critical effort remains on track for completion by the end of this year.

In the coming weeks, our office will develop more detailed recommendations on how the City can make the best use of these infrastructure dollars to effectively prioritize projects, maximize co-benefits, promote collaboration between agencies, mitigate the impacts of climate change, extend the useful life of the infrastructure we build through investments in maintenance, and create high-quality jobs for New Yorkers with barriers to employment. Thank you again for convening this important hearing and for the opportunity to work together to secure the infrastructure that our city needs to thrive into the future.

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