Dear New Yorkers,
It’s hard to believe (or maybe it’s very easy), but 2024 is coming to a close.
For New Yorkers across the five boroughs, this year didn’t go by without serious challenges – from the skyrocketing cost of living (especially housing and child care) to ongoing crises of mental health and homelessness undermining safety in our streets, subways, and neighborhoods.
We’ve got a President-elect threatening to deport our neighbors and undermine our democracy in Washington DC. Closer to home, our municipal government has been marred by indictments, resignations, and scandals.
But there are bright spots of hope in this city everywhere you look. Something about New Yorkers: We often show our best stuff during dark times.
The New York Liberty won the WNBA championship (in a thrilling final I was grateful to attend), and the Yankees and Mets made it deep into the postseason. Our economy has shown strong signs of resilience. Broadway attendance is finally back above pre-pandemic levels (last call to see Suffs and Stereophonic, great shows by some of my favorite New Yorkers, before they close).
Here in the Comptroller’s Office, our tremendous staff of over 700 public servants worked hard these past twelve months to promote the financial health, integrity, and effectiveness of City government – in order to make government work better, strengthen trust, and build a more affordable, safer, and thriving city for all New Yorkers.
Here are a few of the accomplishments I feel proudest of in 2024:
The City’s pension funds saw annual investment returns of 10%, growing to their largest size ever, outpacing many of our peers, and saving $1.8 billion for taxpayers – so our City’s teachers, police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers, nurses, school crossing guards and more can enter the new year knowing their retirement security is sound. (And, I’m happy to say, we were helpful in making sure they don’t get pushed onto privatized Medicare Advantage plans, either).
While earning those great returns, we led the way on responsible investing, with big shareholder engagement wins on climate and workers’ rights, both in the U.S. and abroad. The funds made big strides on diversity, increasing assets under management by MWBE managers by over $6 billion, a 37% increase since I took office.
We brought a relentless focus to the housing crisis, including the pensions funds’ largest investment ever in preserving affordable housing, saving 35,000 rent stabilized units put at risk by the collapse of Signature Bank. Our innovative social bonds have now generated over $2 billion to finance over 7,000 units of low-income housing. Our Budget team did spotlights on the rental market, housing supply, and the homeownership market.
Meanwhile, our Audit and Policy teams did deep dives and generated concrete recommendations to get affordable housing built faster, address big gaps in our street outreach programs, better connect homeless New Yorkers to stable housing, and dramatically improve repairs and accountability for NYCHA residents.
Our team helped to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse across City agencies and contractors. We’ve reviewed over 60,000 City contracts this term. Where they were appropriate, we’ve turned them around faster than ever, with an average of 19 days, well below our Charter mandate of 30 days to register or return them.
But where they didn’t pass muster, we sounded the alarm bell. When the Adams Administration gave a $432 million, no-bid contract to DocGo (a company with no track record providing shelter or services to asylum seekers) over our objection, we launched a real-time audit that revealed extensive mismanagement and got results. The contract was canceled – and responsibility for some of the asylum seekers was transferred to Jewish Family Services of Western New York, who are taking a refugee resettlement approach (i.e. providing legal and social services) that costs far less than DocGo and helps people move out of shelter and achieve self-sufficiency.
We also outlined a detailed, actionable reform plan to prevent corruption in the City’s contracting and procurement practices, of the sort that has been in the news too much this year.
Finally, we launched some great new dashboards to Measure NYC Government Performance and bring transparency to City government, including an Employer Violations Dashboard that brings together city, state, and federal workplace offenses (complete with an Employer Wall of Shame for the worst offenders), and a NYC Agency Staffing Dashboard that’s being cited as a national model.
Those are just a few of the 2024 highlights of the work of our 700 staff across more than 16 bureaus: the Bureaus of Accountancy, Administration, Asset Management, Audit & Investigations, Budget, Communications, Contract Administration, Engineering, General Counsel, Law and Adjustment, Policy & Organizing, Public Affairs, Public Finance, and Workers’ Rights/Labor Law.
I’m deeply proud of the important work happening here at 1 Centre Street, and immensely grateful to every single person here at the Comptroller’s Office.
And I’m grateful, too, to New Yorkers like you, for vesting us with this responsibility. New York remains the greatest city in the world, despite our challenges. It is a profound honor to work together, day in and day out, to help fulfill its astonishing promise.
As the year comes to a close, we mourn the loss of President Jimmy Carter, who showed what it looks like (in a world that often feels like it has lost much of its decency) to live a life of kindness, honor, devotion, and faith.
In addition to his post-presidency work for peace and public health, I especially love that he kept building homes with Habitat for Humanity into his 90s (some of the first were on the Lower East Side). It’s such a simple yet powerful idea, that everyone should have a home – and that we can all help make it happen.
May we all find lessons in his powerful life of service.
With gratitude for the work of our team, and with hope for a brighter 2025,
Brad
EDITOR'S NOTE:
In case you didn't know who this was from, it came from City Comptroller Brad Lander, who did nothing to check on the abuse of overtime in not only the Police Department, but also in the Department of Corrections, and Department of Sanitation.
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