Even as New York City’s capital program stalled during COVID-19, one coordinating agency realized new ways to streamline its emergency work, including using design-build processes.
Mainstreaming some of these procurement measures would “remove the handcuffs” from the Department of Design and Construction, said its first deputy commissioner, Jamie Torres-Springer.
The DDC, the design and construction manager for much of the city’s capital portfolio, works with a cross-section of city agencies and the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget.
After Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s emergency declaration amid the coronavirus surge last March, city officials pulled back on the capital program amid a sudden loss of liquidity in the municipal bond market. The move resulted in moving planned commitments into the out years and reducing the appropriations necessary.
“With the city’s bonding capacity now restored, the challenge is how to restart a stalled capital process and address the accumulated backlog of projects that were out on pause or never commenced,” City Council member Helen Rosenthal said at an online meeting of the subcommittee on the capital budget. Rosenthal, a council member from Manhattan’s West Side, now chairs the subcommittee.
Non-health or safety work early in the pandemic was limited to infrastructure and public building projects whose contracts were already registered and in construction, for which the city was financially liable.
This also opened some creative windows, Torres-Springer said.
“We were not consigned to using the conventional design-bid-build process, which has been historically the only way DDC can deliver because of the low-bid requirement,” he told council members.
State lawmakers in December 2019 approved city use of design-build, “but in a fairly constrained way,” Torres-Springer said. “In the pandemic, we were able on an emergency basis to hire a construction manager and bring that manage together with the design team as an integrated project delivery team.
“Projects that would have taken four to five years, we got them built … $120 million of capital work, we got them built in less than nine months. Probably the most significant thing is giving us alternative modes of delivery.”
According to Torres-Springer, the DDC has $22 billion of activity in the pipeline across more than 700 projects.
Because the DDC manages capital projects for other agencies, it lacks a capital budget of its own. Instead, 20 client agencies, and the nonprofit institutions to which they provide funding, send the DDC projects included in their respective capital budgets and specifically authorized by the capital commitment plan.
Torres-Springer called for tweaks to the notice and hearings process — the so-called Local Law 63, which he said drags out procurements. “Local Law 63 is well-founded legislation by the council, but there are surgical improvements that could be made to make it easier for us,” he said.
He also said contract reviews by the city comptroller’s office “typically add months to our procurements.” During emergency work, he said, his department was able to use OMB’s streamlined process.
