{"id":268668,"date":"2026-06-16T17:30:05","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T17:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/268668\/"},"modified":"2026-06-16T17:30:05","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T17:30:05","slug":"new-york-city-has-a-contract-procurement-problem-and-advocates-are-calling-for-reform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/268668\/","title":{"rendered":"New York City has a contract procurement problem, and advocates are calling for reform"},"content":{"rendered":"

Small vendors and nonprofits<\/a> across New York City have long complained about the complicated, onerous system for obtaining city contracts, known as procurement. But testimony at a string of public hearings and news articles last week thrust the issue back into public debate, renewing arguments for revamping the system.<\/p>\n

Advocates calling for reform, representing industries from education to nonprofits to construction and engineering, all told lawmakers and city officials the same thing: The city must do more to ensure a fair, competitive, and transparent system to award contracts worth billions of taxpayer dollars.<\/p>\n

The subject made multiple appearances last week at City Council Executive Budget Hearings and at hearings for Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s new charter review commission, the Committee on Government Efficiency (COGE).<\/p>\n

At a glance, the city\u2019s procurement system appears simple. The Mayor\u2019s Office of Contract Services (MOCS) describes the process in a five-step infographic<\/a>;<\/p>\n

Get ready to do business;\u00a0
\nShow the city who you are;
\nFind contracting opportunities;
\nRespond to opportunities; and finally,
\nComplete award tasks.<\/p>\n

Prospective vendors need to create accounts with city portals to submit proposals for contracts and payment information, those proposals are reviewed by city agencies and MOCS, the contract is awarded, the vendor completes the work or services and then the city pays them.<\/p>\n

But those who have gone through the process, or who have attempted to provide oversight of city contracts, told amNewYork that working with the city and getting paid for it is anything but simple.\n<\/p>\n

City contract procurement process \u2018burdensome\u2019<\/p>\n

Allyson Martinez is the founding executive director of the nonprofit,\u00a0BKLVLUP<\/a>, which supports community-based initiatives on everything from climate change to technology or economic equity.\u00a0She told amNewYork that the bureaucratic red tape in the procurement process often prevents small organizations from even attempting to win city contracts because they often do not have the staff or funding to compile extensive documentation or wait long periods of time without payment.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u200aIt\u2019s not all delineated in one document and then you can just knock off everything at once,\u201d Martinez said. \u201cIt is dealing with one issue, submit, and then they come back with another issue thereafter, and meanwhile, the clock is ticking. Sometimes you\u2019re already doing the work, and then you just have these administrative hurdles that become very burdensome.\u201d<\/p>\n

Martinez said that BKLVLUP was finally able to break into public contracts through a master contracts program with the\u00a0Committee for Citizens NYC,<\/a> which facilitates paperwork and expedited payments from the city for small businesses, minority and women-owned business enterprises (MWBOE), and nonprofits.\u00a0Without the partnership with CitizensNYC, Martinez told amNewYork that her organization wouldn\u2019t be able to work with the city.<\/p>\n

Chief of Strategy and Operations for Citizens NYC Michael Hickey gave testimony in front of the first public hearing of COGE last week to ask the commission to rethink the way the city awards contracts.<\/p>\n

Hickey told the commission that CitizensNYC\u2019s master contract was one way that organizations developed to work around the burdensome requirements that can oftentimes keep community-based organizations out of city contracts. But, he said that this unique model of facilitating the procurement process would not realistically be scalable. Hickey said the city could draw inspiration from the program\u2019s mission when rethinking its procurement approach.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt can serve as an example of what happens when a city agency commits to creating an innovative procurement pathway that\u2019s purpose-built for engaging hyperlocal leaders, restoring trust in communities by partnering with those who already have it, deepening understanding of neighborhood needs and applying those learnings to agency planning and operations,\u201d Hickey said.<\/p>\n

The city continues to face scrutiny over its contracts with nonprofits like BKLVLUP. Last year, former city comptroller Brad Lander published a report showing that NYC owed over $1 billion to nonprofits serving the city. The fallout spurred a new 2025 law requiring the city to pay a larger percentage of its contracts with cash-strapped nonprofits upfront.<\/p>\n

Then last week, nonprofits were outraged when NBC reported that Mayor Mamdani was considering delaying implementing the payments due to cash flow problems. But on June 15, City Hall announced it would go ahead with the payments as planned.<\/p>\n

Still, advocates say it\u2019s not just nonprofits that suffer from long-delayed payments for city contracts.\n<\/p>\n

Bill Murray and Taylor Palmer from the American Council of Engineering Companies of New York (ACEC New York) told the COGE last week that vendors contracted to design and develop infrastructure projects for the city risked time and money waiting on the city to complete its obligation to file paperwork.<\/p>\n

They said that vendors are only paid once a city contract is registered with the city comptroller\u2019s office. However, Murray and Palmer said that vendors are often instructed or pressured to begin their projects well before that happens. Murray told commissioners that both large and small firms<\/p>\n

\u201cFirms are asked to hire and organize their staff, mobilize their resources, incur overhead, incur payroll costs and perform services often times for many months without an enforceable agreement for payment in place,\u201d Murray said. \u201cIn effect the city relies on private firms to finance when delays occur. This burden falls particularly hard on smaller firms who are sub consultants to prime contract holders.\u201d<\/p>\n

DOE contract procurement in the spotlight<\/p>\n

Murray said that sometimes beginning work before the contracts were registered could leave firms footing the bill for additional delays, personnel changes and project modifications. He and Palmer called on the city to pass similar laws in the development sector to the ones passed in 2025 which allowed an expedited payment process for vendors working on public infrastructure projects.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The city\u2019s system for awarding contracts within the Department of Education (DOE) was under fire for different reasons last week. City Council members grilled Public Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels<\/a> over contracts awarded to a vendor during his time as a superintendent that ultimately led to hiring someone who had been previously banned from working in schools due to concerns over comments and conduct with students.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The school system operates its own procurement system that is separate from the city\u2019s standard system. One of the key issues lawmakers and advocates raised is the lack of transparency in DOE contracts and the creative ways school administrators have historically used to speed up the procurement process and get resources into students\u2019 hands quickly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Samuels\u2019 case, the contracts at the center of the scandal were split into separate, smaller contracts of $25,000, which kept them below a financial threshold that triggers a greater level of scrutiny, more paperwork, and a longer approval timeline.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the contract making news of late was hardly the first example of breaking large contracts into smaller ones to move things along. City Council Member Eric Dinowitz (D-Bronx), who chairs the Committee on Education, said that the amount the city spent on DOE contracts under $25,000 in 2024 was over $300 million.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dinowitz, who began his career as an educator, told amNewYork that DOE contracts needed more oversight, to avoid wasting taxpayer dollars.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI personally have been witness to these purchases that were kind of a head scratch,\u201d Dinowitz said.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

Leonie Haimson, an education advocate and the executive director of the nonprofit group Class Size Matters, told amNewYork that many contracts within the DOE looked suspicious, but that effective oversight was difficult because the system lacked transparency.<\/p>\n

In a budgetary oversight hearing, council members said that they were not given access to contract details they had requested. Haimson said the opaque contracting process was hurting students and costing taxpayers money.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are not private documents. There\u2019s nothing supposed to be secret in them,\u201d Haimson said. \u201cThey are supposed to be public, and the fact that the city council wasn\u2019t provided any of them is really a much bigger scandal than what the chancellor may have or may not have done with this dividing it up into $25,000 increments.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dinowitz told amNewYork that the documents should be available to the City Council.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cFor a third of the city\u2019s budget, we should be able to review contracts more quickly,\u201d Dinowitz said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Small vendors and nonprofits across New York City have long complained about the complicated, onerous system for obtaining…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":268669,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[14927,48103,2184,67,9,103726,11,10,6202,8229,41427],"class_list":["post-268668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-city-budget","tag-city-comptroller","tag-development","tag-education","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city-contracts","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-nonprofits","tag-nyc-public-schools","tag-procurement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268668\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/268669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}