Public Project Therapy: Unpacking Recent Capital Process Reforms

The process of delivering public works in New York City impacts how New Yorkers and visitors experience the city, how well communities are served, and how readily architects and other design professionals can participate. As part of the NYC Capital Process Reform Task Force, AIANY partnered with industry experts and agency leaders to find efficiencies in the capital design and delivery process, reflected in a series of recommendations, published in 2022. Since then, we’ve made tremendous progress to work more quickly and collaboratively, saving taxpayer dollars and delivering better projects for our communities.

On December 11, 2024, the program Public Project Therapy: Unpacking Recent Capital Process Reforms addressed the following key questions:

• How does capital delivery impact New York City’s public realm?
• How is alternative delivery reshaping the process, and what lessons can we learn from the advocacy that led to expanding the city’s delivery toolkit?
• How can the design and construction process reflect our values and meet our goals as a city?

Speakers included Alison Landry, Chief Delivery Officer, Deputy Mayor for Operations; Becky Yurek, AIA, Chief Strategy Officer, NYC DDC; Yvi McEvilly, PLA, DBIA, Assistant Commissioner, Design-Build Unit, NYC DDC; Bria Donohue, Senior Manager of Government Affairs, AIANY; Deborah Marton, President, NYC Public Design Commission; Annya Ramirez-Jimenez, AIA, Partner, MARVEL; Stephen Wilder, AIA, NYCOBA-NOMA, Founder and Principal, Think Wilder Architecture; and Michael Plottel, FAIA, Chair, AIANY Public Architecture Committee

A “cheat sheet” of the need-to-know terms can be found here.

In case you missed Public Project Therapy, an overview of the program is as follows:

• The Mayor’s Capital Process Reform Task Force formed to change how the city builds, publishing a roadmap in 2022 that laid out changes to how the City plans projects to be successful, hires designers and contractors to ensure quality and collaboration, and sets up projects for success to effectively deliver excellence and consistence across the board. Of the 39 recommendations, 24 have been implemented as of the end of 2024, but now the real work begins to build out programs, engage with the industry on best practices, and set up projects to scale up in a successful way.
• The Mayor’s Office recently published the 2024 end of year report, Build Better NYC, focused on how to improve the pipeline, reform procurement, and make it easier to participate. Beyond the Task Force’s recommendations, additional changes to supercharge the delivery process have been enacted by interagency teams and government leadership.
• The city lacks the tools to develop holistic, long term capital plans, so DDC is launched its Advanced Capital Planning program to improve how the city plans capital projects. DDC is actively making tangible changes to the process, that will be launched in their 2025 contracts, looking at ways to make it easier to find opportunities, making it less onerous to apply, and leveling requirements across the agency. These improvements to the design process include limiting sponsor scope changes, streamlining design review, launching better tools (like cloud-based standard specifications), and providing opportunities to exchange lessons learned (including post-occupancy evaluations).
• Authorized under the Public Works Investment Act, Design-Build allows DDC to award a contract to a single, integrated team – fostering purposeful collaboration to deliver high quality projects. With Design Build, the city can prioritize innovative design and commit to its implementation with construction expertise in design and design expertise in construction and deliver spaces that are functional and maintainable bringing the end-user needs to the forefront of project planning. Expanding the toolbox of alternative delivery methods will give DDC the tools needed to deliver their large and complex portfolio of public works.
• How do we deliver quality projects, and how will alternative delivery tools make the process better?
  • The current systems are not inherently set up for quality because quality is not incentivized in a system where the contractor is selected based on the lowest price. The manner in which team members are selected for quality and the expanded criteria for selection beyond price is essential.
  • It is important to have the contractor working together collaboratively with the designer early in the design process to speak to feasibility, cost, and scheduling challenges in order to leverage the expertise of the complete team from the beginning.
  • Contracts must be written in a way that emphasizes the quality the owner wants.
• How has industry feedback shaped design build, and how will you carry the lessons learned into your approach with alternative delivery?
  • DDC heard from the industry that they needed to do more due diligence and meet with the sponsor agencies more often to establish clear goals going into the project, which then gets built into the RFP.
  • DDC heard the importance of stipends to get the best value in technical proposals.
  • DDC heard concerns about collaborative design meetings being overly onerous, so having fewer CDMs at the beginning, making expectations clearer from the top, and making sure the real decision makers are in the room will help streamline the process.
• How do we fit public works into the public realm and deliver quality?
  • Quality is a priority engrained into DDC
  • Value will mean something different for every project so it’s important to enable the stakeholders to determine what the driving elements of the project are
  • Important to create flexibility in requirements to ensure quality outcomes
• Panel Takeaways
  • Doing public work is complex and challenging, so shifting to a more collaborative and trust-based model can ensure and protect quality.
  • Critical to get coordinated feedback from decision makers at key points in the project.
  • It cannot only be on city agencies to get MWBEs involved, rather it is incumbent upon prime firms to build real relationships with MWBEs instead of fostering an environment where it feels that the MWBE involvement is checking a box.
  • An important way to meaningfully foster relationship between sponsor agency and design is for the designer to be engaged in the community engagement process so the owner and designer are collaboratively working on a design that fully encompasses the project needs