Why NYC Can’t Build Things on Time
PLUS I'm hosting events on Jan 5 and Jan 6!
I’m hosting a couple events in the new year to help YOU get more involved in local politics and policy.
Community Board 101
✨ RSVP HERE ✨
On January 5, Open New York is hosting a Community Board 101 training/info session. I’ll be presenting, as well as two other current community board members. If you’re thinking of applying for your Community Board, the applications open in early 2026, so this info session is great timing! We plan to cover:
What Community Boards are and why they matter
What it’s like to be on a Community Board
The application process
When: Monday, 1/5/26, 6-8PM
Where: Open New York office or online. We will have food.
✨ RSVP HERE ✨
I’ve written a lot about community boards, including what they do, how to influence them, and my firsthand experience serving on a particularly dramatic one.
An Intro to County Committee
✨ RSVP here ✨
On January 6, Rep Your Block, Locally Sourced NYC, and NYC Politics 101 are partnering to help you learn about County Committee!
The County Committee is the ground floor of the Democratic Party.
Consider County Committee if you want to get more involved in local politics, but 3 community board meetings a month is too much of a commitment.
Consider County Committee if you want to pick the winning candidate in your next special election.
Come learn all about this position, why it matters, and how you can run in 2026!
When: Tuesday, January 6, 2026, 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Where: Fabrik Dumbo. We will have food.
✨ RSVP here ✨
For more info on County Committee, here’s my explainer post from last year.
I’m sharing the topics I’m exploring to build a stronger foundation for serving on the NYC’s Comptroller transition committee. I’m sharing what I learn along the way, so thanks for joining me in my research on Comptroller-related topics!
I’m serving on the next NYC Comptroller’s Transition Committee
I’m honored to serve on Mark Levine’s transition committee as he prepares to begin his new role of New York City Comptroller.
When I wrote my last post on lawsuits against the City, another category of claims caught my eye. Construction delays. This isn’t the biggest amount of money (the City paid out $43M in 2023), but I’m interested in it because 1) it seems like it might be a particularly relevant place for the Comptroller to have influence, 2) building stuff faster and for cheaper would be a huge win for the city, and 3) building stuff faster and for cheaper would help build trust in local government.
It’s really awful that we take for granted that every city project is late and over budget. We should be able to hold high expectations for our city systems. Trust in government matters because when we stop believing better outcomes are possible, we stop pushing for them. We should all feel entitled to great public services. If we feel entitled to great public services, we can have them. If we give up, it’s our own fault we live with rats and train delays.
So what’s keeping the city from delivering public projects on time and on budget? Here’s what I set out to explore in this post:
What do we know about how timely and on-budget our public projects are?
What types of public projects are most likely to hit delays?
What types of public projects are most likely to end up over budget?
What are the most common delays?
…and how to fix them?
What do we know about how timely and on-budget our public projects are?
The State Comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, conducted a deep dive into NYC public projects in 2024. His team used the publicly available information in the city’s Capital Projects dashboard to analyze what proportion are delivered on time and on budget. I’ll share their findings here– but there’s an important caveat. The dashboard isn’t up to date. The data is incomplete. It was missing 47% of planned projects. Comptroller Brad Lander’s most recent report in December 2025 summed up the problem:
Many fundamental questions about capital projects remain unanswerable using City-provided data. The Capital Projects Dashboard is woefully incomplete, while the Capital Commitment Plan and Ten-Year Capital Strategy documents continue to be released as incompressible, nearly two-thousand-page, multi-volume PDFs with arcane labels and a byzantine layout.
Lander’s report recommends integrating all the data into the dashboard to improve transparency, monitoring, and improvements to delays.
Because we don’t have complete or cohesive data, we can’t pinpoint the causes of the worst delays or cost overruns. We can’t highlight the projects that are going well and attempt to replicate their success. The data problem is a huge setback.
But in the meantime, we have incomplete data that tells an incomplete story. That’s not super satisfying, but let’s start with the data we’ve got.
DiNapoli used the city’s dashboard to analyze 5,000+ NYC public projects and found:
64% faced delays that set them back at least three months past their planned completion date.
50%, were excessively delayed, three or more years behind their completion date.
52% were over budget, with total spending at $54.5 billion more than initially anticipated. Nearly two-fifths were more than 20% over budget.🫨
27% of projects were on budget, and 21% were under budget.
What types of public projects are most likely to hit delays?
Certain types of projects are more likely to be behind schedule or over budget than others. Comptroller DiNapoli found that the following types of projects were most likely to start late:
Courts
Waterway bridges
Water supply
Traffic
Highways
Public buildings
Library
Economic development projects
NYC Health + Hospitals projects
Police department projects
Cultural affairs projects
Projects in this (long!) list of categories were all likely to start more than two years late. Yes, years. Not two months late. Two years late.
These types of delays directly impact the cost of projects, since prices of labor and materials increase over time.
What types of public projects are most likely to end up over budget?
The following types of projects were more likely to go excessively over budget.
Courts
Highway bridges
Cultural affairs projects
Sanitation
Water pollution
Water mains
For these categories, more than half of their projects were at least 20% over original cost estimates.
The State Comptroller also found that projects that spanned multiple areas were more likely to experience cost overruns. In these cases, it’s possible that improving interagency coordination could help keep projects on budget.
What are the most common delays?
The State Comptroller found that more than half of delayed projects were categorized as “budgetary constraint” delays. But we don’t have more detail than that. DiNapoli guessed budgetary constraint delays may be due to a lack of capital funding in the city treasury during the project span or changes to funding commitments. However, because the city does not explain what is causing budgetary constraints and how they are contributing to delays, it’s hard to tell.
…and how to fix them?
To manage public projects better, the City needs a clearer understanding of what causes delays and cost overruns. Right now, the project dashboard doesn’t have complete data or give enough detail to identify trends. Agencies need to follow Lander’s recommendations and fix the dashboard.
The Comptroller can’t force agencies to do a better job with the dashboard, but the Comptroller can use the power of the audit to get data from agencies. My curiosity goes to the courts ones in particular, since I could reasonably see how things related to bridges or water could get complicated, but why are the courts projects facing huge delays and budget issues?
Don’t forget to RSVP for
✨An Intro to County Committee ✨
See you in January!
Curious to know if you saw any patterns among projects that finish early or under budget! Maybe there’s something to learn from those projects as well.