Can New York Deliver More Efficient Government?
A look at several proposed reforms to improve permitting, fiscal discipline, and regulatory accountability.
New York City’s Commission on Government Efficiency has moved quickly since it was first announced by Mayor Zohran Mamdani three weeks ago. The commission is tasked with proposing changes to the city charter that will be put to voters in November. It has begun holding a series of public hearings at which New Yorkers can recommend reforms for the commission to consider.
Though the commission’s public process has just begun, several proposals submitted at its first hearings would address genuine weaknesses in city government. Three deserve particular attention.
The first is a proposal to make a single agency accountable for inspecting and approving new buildings. Current rules require developers in the city to navigate a thicket of agencies, including the Department of Buildings, Fire Department, Department of Environmental Protection, and Department of Transportation. The result is a fragmented approval and permitting process marked by overlapping reviews, duplicative paperwork, and lengthy delays that raise costs and can derail the financing of new projects. Under these rules, securing the permits necessary to build a residential property of five or more units takes an average of 18 months.
Catherine Vaughan and Robert Joyce of Abundance New York have proposed making the Department of Buildings (DOB) the lead agency and single point of accountability for building approvals. Rather than requiring applicants to coordinate separately with several bureaucracies, DOB would manage the process, track a project’s progress, and coordinate the reviews required from other departments.
Under this model, specialized agencies could retain their substantive responsibilities: the Fire Department would continue conducting fire-safety reviews, for example, while the Department of Transportation would oversee work involving streets and sidewalks. But applicants would have one primary point of contact and avoid the need to navigate disconnected processes or repeatedly submitting the same information to different agencies. Joyce told City Journal that the city could also transfer some specialized personnel to DOB, further consolidating expertise and simplifying the approval process.
The charter could reinforce this system by requiring firm review deadlines. Applicants might pay an additional fee for expedited processing, while standard fees could be reduced or refunded if the city misses its own deadlines, as some states have done. Such a system would give agencies an incentive to act promptly and give builders greater certainty about how long the approval process will take.
Vaughan also suggested allowing updates to the building code to be made through administrative rulemaking rather than requiring the city council to pass a local law each time, as is currently the case. A similar change in San Francisco resulted in a 28 percent decrease in processing times.
A second worthwhile reform would impose clearer rules on the city’s rainy-day fund. New York’s dependence on a small group of high-income taxpayers leaves its finances unusually exposed to economic downturns. As my colleague E. J. McMahon noted in a recent Manhattan Institute report, just 0.9 percent of city income-tax filers earned 34 percent of taxable income in 2023 and paid 37 percent of the personal income tax. Much of their income comes from volatile sources, including capital gains and bonuses.
In the case of an economic downturn, city revenue can therefore decline abruptly. New York has established a rainy-day fund to cushion such shocks, but the charter provides relatively little guidance about how much the city should contribute during prosperous years or under what circumstances the money may be withdrawn.
Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, recommended that the city charter be amended to require regular deposits during economic upturns and to restrict the use of these funds except in times of recession or other emergencies. The city comptroller’s office has similarly recommended building reserves equal to roughly 16 percent of annual tax revenue—enough to help absorb a severe downturn. Clear rules would make it harder for elected officials to spend windfalls during boom years and then raise taxes or slash services when the economy weakens.
A third noteworthy proposal would require lawmakers to reckon more seriously with the economic consequences of the bills they pass. The city council introduced 1,163 bills during the 2024–2025 legislative session; some were minor, but many will have drastic impacts on employers, consumers, property owners, and the city’s broader economic competitiveness.
Section 33 of the City Charter already requires a fiscal-impact statement before the council votes to pass a bill. But these are generally limited to the bill’s immediate effects on the city budget, such as the cost of administering or enforcing it, rather than the broader costs imposed on businesses and the public.
Local business owner Patrick Hall suggested that the commission could require small-business impact statements for each piece of proposed legislation. The commissioner could go even further by requiring a concise economic-impact analysis for bills expected to impose substantial new regulatory burdens. Such an analysis could estimate compliance costs, identify the businesses and consumers likely to bear them, and explain the benefits that lawmakers expect the measure to produce.
To be credible, the comptroller’s office or another independent body could produce or review the analysis according to a consistent set of standards. New York should take care not to create a municipal version of environmental review that invites years of studies and litigation by ensuring that analyses of future legislative proposals are standardized, proportionate, and completed within a fixed period. The result would be to help lawmakers and voters identify measures whose burdens exceed their likely benefits while making the city more attractive for businesses to invest, expand, and create jobs.
The Commission on Government Efficiency will hold hearings across all five boroughs before deciding which charter amendments, if any, to place before voters. These changes would not, by themselves, solve New York’s housing, fiscal, or competitiveness problems. But a city government that approves construction more efficiently, saves during prosperous years, and considers the costs of regulations before imposing them would be more competent and accountable than the one New Yorkers have today.