Public Works Partners is pleased that our study A Survey of Capital Project Management Among New York City Government Agencies, which we researched and wrote for the advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks, has just been released and is garnering serious attention from the Parks Department and the City Council, as well as a bit of press.

Working side by side with New Yorkers for Parks, and with the full cooperation of the Parks Department, we conducted extensive interviews with several City agencies that commission capital projects, along with the City’s budget and contracting agencies, to identify best practices as well as that challenges that each agency faces. In nearly every facet of the capital process, we discovered that other agencies can provide valuable lessons for the Parks Department to explore.

The report offers a number of straightforward steps that Parks can take to improve its capital program management to ensure projects are timelier, more cost-effective, and processes are transparent. These include: baselining more capital funding in the Mayoral budget; outlining a faster and more clearly defined design process; using a better system for selecting and working with vendors; collaborating with other City agencies; and developing systems that develop greater accountability within the capital division at Parks. Each of these suggestions is expanded upon in the report.

What’s next? The good news is that this report won’t just sit on a shelf. Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver has already begun taking a hard look at the capital division, and the department is using our report as one of the starting points for the assessment.

Download the Report (PDF)