Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE) on Infrastructure and the Public Realm – Public Hearing
Submitted on June 23, 2026

Introduction

Urban Design Forum is a member-powered civic organization of more than 1,200 civic leaders — planners, designers, architects, lawyers, developers, and neighborhood advocates — working to design, build, and care for a better New York City. Through our Local Center initiative, a partnership with the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development (ANHD), we have worked alongside neighborhood leaders in 17 low-income communities across all five boroughs to activate parks, plazas, and streets. We have also convened our members, City agency partners, and peer organizations over many years to develop concrete ideas for reforming how the City manages and invests in the public realm.

We welcome the Commission on Government Efficiency’s focus on infrastructure and the public realm, and we submit this testimony to share what we have learned — from practitioners, from partners, and from our own direct experience navigating the systems that govern public space in New York City.

What We Have Seen

Public spaces across New York City are sustained by an extraordinary network of grassroots and nonprofit partners: conservancies, block associations, Business Improvement Districts, community development corporations, Open Streets partners, and cultural organizations. These groups collectively invest hundreds of millions of dollars annually while fostering economic vitality, social connection, and civic life. Yet in neighborhoods without well-resourced BIDs or conservancies — typically neighborhoods where low- and moderate-income New Yorkers of different backgrounds live — local organizations are left to navigate a fragmented and often hostile regulatory system on their own.

Through the Local Center, we have documented this experience directly. Our partners in Richmond Hill, Soundview, Brownsville, Tompkinsville, and elsewhere came to us with strong visions and deep neighborhood relationships. What stopped them was not a lack of ideas. It was a system not built to support them.

The Scale and Geography of Public Space Stewardship

Urban Design Forum recently completed the first comprehensive citywide survey of public space stewardship organizations in New York City — the most expansive effort of its kind since the USDA Forest Service’s STEW-MAP project in 2017. Drawing on records from 33 partner organizations across all five boroughs, we identified 6,052 unique organizations stewarding public space in New York City today. That number is substantially larger than any previous estimate, and it reflects how much of our city’s public realm depends on civic infrastructure that government has rarely counted, funded, or organized as a constituency.

Several findings are directly relevant to this Commission’s work. The field skews dramatically small and informal: more than half of organizations with IRS filings operate on budgets under $100,000 a year, and one in three public space partners — roughly 2,000 organizations — are informal volunteer groups with no nonprofit registration at all. These groups are largely invisible to City procurement systems, locked out of most grant programs, and unable to carry the insurance that permitting agencies require. The regulatory systems this Commission is examining are not just burdensome for established organizations — they are effectively closed to a third of the people doing this work.

The geographic distribution of stewardship also reveals a significant equity gap. Manhattan and Brooklyn together account for 65% of all stewardship organizations. Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island are all underrepresented relative to their populations — and when stewardship density is mapped against income, a clear pattern emerges: many low-income neighborhoods across the Bronx, eastern Brooklyn, and southeast Queens have both the fewest public space partners and the fewest resources to compensate for that gap. The neighborhoods most in need of vibrant, well-maintained public spaces are the least served by the civic infrastructure that makes them possible.

At the same time, this field generates substantial economic activity. Among organizations whose primary purpose is public space — Business Improvement Districts, park conservancies, and “Friends of” groups — at least $532 million flows annually, including $194 million through BIDs and $330 million through conservancies and stewardship organizations. This is a floor estimate. The civic and economic value of this field is significant, and it depends on a permitting and funding infrastructure that currently fails many of its most important contributors.

Recommendations

We offer three areas where charter reform can make a material difference.

1. Streamline Permitting and Grant Grantmaking Authority to More Agencies Working Directly with Public Space Partners

Activating a public space in New York City requires navigating a fragmented matrix of agencies — the Street Activity Permit Office, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Parks and Recreation, the Department of Small Business Services, the Department of City Planning, and others — each with its own rules, timelines, and points of contact. There is no uniform process, no single interface, and no shared accountability for getting neighborhood organizations to a permit.

Our partners have experienced this firsthand. In Sunnyside, Queens, the Sunnyside Shines BID and their design team faced significant roadblocks obtaining temporary concession agreements and parking allowances for a night market — even with direct agency connections through the Local Center and dedicated legal support. According to their legal counsel, there was no transparent, uniform process: they were “at the whim of whoever was looking at the application.”

The City Charter can address this in two ways. First, the Charter could establish a dedicated coordinating office or designate a senior official within the Office of Operations — currently authorized under Section 15 of the Charter to coordinate City services and promote efficient agency delivery — with explicit authority over agencies managing permitting in the public realm, including Parks, DOT, SBS, and SAPO. With the Chief Public Realm Officer role now eliminated, there is no single point of accountability for interagency coordination in the public realm. A charter-backed structure, rather than one dependent on executive discretion, would ensure that coordination function endures across administrations.

Second, the Charter could be amended to grant the Department of Transportation explicit authority to make grants directly to nonprofit partners for public space activation. Currently, DOT’s powers under the Charter are defined around traffic and infrastructure; there is no grantmaking authority. This forces public space funding to flow through SBS and other agencies not primarily designed for this purpose, creating bottlenecks and limiting the scale of investment. The gap is particularly stark given how central DOT already is to the work — it manages the plaza and Open Streets programs that neighborhood organizations depend on. Making DOT a vested grantmaking agency would better align funding tools with the partners it already serves.

2. Extend the Public Design Commission’s Approval Period for Temporary Installations with Accountability Safeguards

The City Charter currently requires that any temporary public art installation intended to remain for more than one year undergo full Public Design Commission review (Section 854g). In practice, this means community-built structures — the product of months or years of neighborhood engagement, design work, and permitting — face a hard one-year ceiling before triggering an additional approval process, with no guarantee of extension. Across our Local Center projects, teams consistently identified this threshold as a barrier to lasting impact. As one of our design partners reflected: “It feels wasteful to go through such meaningful engagement and develop a community asset and not have a clear pathway to deliver more lasting change for the neighborhood.”

We recommend that the Charter be amended to raise this threshold from one year to two years — allowing temporary public art and installation projects to remain in place for up to two years without triggering full PDC review. This would reduce the administrative burden on small nonprofits, give installations time to demonstrate their value, and create space for neighborhoods to build the case for permanent capital investment.

To ensure this change works well in practice, we recommend that extended approvals be paired with a straightforward accountability framework: sponsoring organizations would demonstrate a maintenance plan as a condition of the longer permit; agencies would retain authority to modify or revoke approvals if safety standards are not met; and a light-touch midpoint check-in at the one-year mark would confirm the installation remains active and well-maintained. These are not additional bureaucratic hurdles — they are the kind of responsible stewardship practices that would ensure that a longer approval period benefits neighborhoods without locking spaces into installations that have run their course.

3. Modernize Civil Service to Build Government Capacity in the Public Realm

The City’s ability to deliver on public realm improvements depends on its ability to hire, retain, and coordinate skilled staff across agencies. Civil service rules present significant barriers: cumbersome examination requirements, infrequent testing dates, pay scales disconnected from the private sector, and limited flexibility in scheduling and work arrangements make it difficult to fill critical positions in housing, planning, and public realm agencies.

We recognize that many civil service rules are governed by New York State law and fall outside the City Charter’s direct jurisdiction. However, the Charter does govern how the Department of Citywide Administrative Services administers examinations and manages the City workforce (Sections 812–817), and there is room for the Charter to direct more flexible and timely examination scheduling, broader use of provisional and exempt appointments for hard-to-fill positions, and requirements for interagency technology coordination that would improve the efficiency of public space permitting and delivery across agencies.

Conclusion

New York City’s public spaces are not failing for lack of vision. They are failing because the systems that govern them — the permitting processes, the approval timelines, the funding pipelines, the workforce rules — were not built to support neighborhood-led stewardship, particularly in the communities that need it most.

The Commission on Government Efficiency has an opportunity to change that. Charter reform can enshrine the coordinating authority needed to streamline permitting, unlock new funding tools for neighborhood organizations, and give community-built assets the longevity they deserve. Urban Design Forum and our partners across the five boroughs stand ready to support that work.

We also want to lift up the testimony of M. Blaise Backer, which offers a number of compelling ideas for amending the Charter to address these challenges, including: creating a fourth instrument in Chapter 14 in the form of a public realm stewardship agreement; rightsizing the Franchise and Concession Review Committee for small and community-scale agreements; allowing a defined share of locally generated revenue to remain with the space that generates it; and providing bounded term security for partners that finance public improvements. We encourage the Commission to consider these recommendations alongside our own.

We thank the Commission for the opportunity to submit this testimony and look forward to continued engagement.

Sincerely, 

Daniel McPhee, Executive Director

Martha Snow, Director of Community Design

Guillermo Gómez, Director of Programs

Urban Design Forum

urbandesignforum.org