Reforming the way the City’s capital dollars are spent is key to creating a more stable long-term economy for New York City. The City currently spends 12 cents of every dollar to covering debts from past projects – by 2014 this will total $6.9 billion. To address this, Speaker Quinn proposed beginning a new system of paying for a portion of the capital budget up front. The Speaker noted that, had the City started doing this just ten years ago, the City would have $500 million less in debt services to pay.
Speaker Quinn also called for more aggressive oversight of all city contracts, both large and small. There are currently more than 17,000 city contracts at a cost of more than $10 billion. Legislation proposed in today’s speech will require key elements of all city contracts to be summarized in plain language, and made available online, allowing the public to clearly see where money is going.
