Despite recent reforms, cost overruns and delays continue to plague city projects.
May 1, 2026 — City Council members aired their frustrations about New York City’s notoriously slow timelines for capital construction projects at a joint hearing of the Contracts, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Cultural Affairs, Libraries, and International Relations committees on Wednesday. Every seat was occupied at the Council’s 8th floor hearing room at 250 Broadway, with some members of the public relegated to an overflow space, in a reflection of the issue’s relevance to nearly every city agency, as well as countless community groups and cultural institutions.
On the agenda were two bills related to capital construction projects. One, put forward by Council Member Shekar Krishnan, would create a strategic blueprint on how to reduce capital construction timelines by 25 percent. The other, by Council Member Linda Lee, would call on Albany to expand design-build authority to all city agencies. As the first hearing for both bills, neither was voted on.
Discussion at the hearing primarily focused on the problems with the existing capital construction bureaucracy. For nearly two hours, Council members grilled Paul Ochoa, the newly installed commissioner of the Department of Design and Construction (DDC), the agency that manages most of the city’s capital construction projects, which includes new construction, renovations, and infrastructure work. Ochoa, in his third day on the job following his appointment by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, was not always able to answer Council members’ questions.
In their questioning, Council Members Lincoln Restler, Chair of the Contracts Committee; Shaun Abreu, Majority Leader and Chair of the Transportation Committee; and Nantasha Williams, Deputy Speaker and Chair of the Cultural Affairs Committee, drew from several critical reports on capital construction management in recent years. One report, published by the Center for a New Urban Future in 2021, highlighted issues such as a small contractor pool, delays from third-party city agencies, and long approval periods for change orders.
Another report, published last year by then-Comptroller Brad Lander, found an average delay of three and a half years across 1,000 DDC-managed projects. It also noted that DDC does not have a system for tracking project costs over time.
Ochoa said he disagreed with the way report characterized project delay. “There’s a lot of the recommendations in the Comptroller’s report that we agree with — the timelines we disagree,” he said. He noted that the report started measuring project timelines before projects were in the hands of DDC.
Another confounding factor for DDC’s time and cost projections are changes in project design initiated by sponsor agencies midway through the planning or construction process. These “scope changes” can add time and money to projects — and are not under DDC’s control.
“It is normal for agencies to want to add scope to projects, since they only get one bite of the apple,” Ochoa said. “I do not consider the consequences of these decisions cost overruns or delays in the traditional sense.”
Abreu noted that most constituents would simply view scope increases as delay. “For them, the project is not being done by the deadline that was agreed to. That’s the confusion,” he said.
DDC has made some progress improving construction timelines in recent years. Many of the recommendations in Krishnan’s bill, which was originally introduced in 2023, have already been adopted. In 2024, the state legislature allowed eight city agencies to use design-build project management.
One design-build project, the Shirley Chisholm Recreation Center in Brooklyn, was completed in three years, roughly half the time it would have been expected to take under the prior system, according to the city. The city estimates that design-build projects produce a roughly 10 percent cost savings compared to traditional construction management. Lee’s bill would ask the state to extend that authority to the rest of city government.
The city is just beginning to authorize projects under a new management system, “CM-Build.” This allows the city to hire an external construction manager that can begin pre-construction planning concurrent with design work. In March, DDC announced its first five CM-Build projects, including two library renovations and a social services building in Chinatown.
Much of the work to speed up capital project projects will have to come from outside of DDC, with project delivery reforms at sponsor agencies and the Office of Management and Budget, John Surico, a fellow at the Center for a New Urban Future and a co-author of the organization’s report on capital construction management, said in testimony to the Council.
“DDC already has a strategic blueprint that has proven to be effective in reducing timelines,” Surico told Remapping Debate after the hearing. “If it’s scaled to other agencies, those reforms could make a real difference in bringing down costs and saving the Mamdani administration some much-needed dollars at a time of fiscal constraint.”