Dear New Yorkers, 

A year ago, I took office as New York City Comptroller, with a vision of “accounting together” for a more thriving, equitable, and resilient city – that by making city government work better, we can ensure a more inclusive recovery, and a future of better-shared thriving.

One year in, I have been blown away by the breadth and depth of the work happening in this office on behalf of New Yorkers.

Yes, we manage the pension funds and oversee the budget – but did you know that our office processes workers compensation payments (now electronically, for the first year ever)? That our accountancy and contracts teams make sure City vendors get paid? And that our bank accounts have the money to pay them? Did you know that if you need a certificate of residence to get in-state community college tuition our office is the place to go? Or that we issue the bonds that finance our parks, schools, infrastructure, and affordable housing?

I am tremendously grateful for the amazing team of dedicated civil servants here at the Comptroller’s Office who work hard every day to ensure that the City’s bills are paid, that retirees have financial security, that our capital projects are financed, that New Yorkers working on public projects aren’t stiffed of their wages, and so much more.

Here are just a few of our accomplishments from the past year:

We persuaded the Mayor and City Council to make the largest ever deposit into the City’s “rainy day fund” to protect against cuts to City services in case of a future recession. Our budget analysis made the case against cuts to our public schools, and led to new investments to support education and childcare for students from families seeking asylum. Our policy report highlighted how staff vacancies in key agencies pose severe operational challenges to essential services from cybersecurity to affordable housing.

We created brand-new transparency tools to help New Yorkers learn about the spending of federal stimulus dollars, the City’s progress towards climate goals, the status of pension fund investments, the crisis facing our jail system, and the implementation of recommendations from our audits of City agencies.

We steered the pension fund investments through a turbulent year in the markets, including moving quickly to protect pension beneficiaries by divesting from Russian companies following the invasion of Ukraine. We successfully campaigned for state legislation to provide more flexibility in our asset allocation and made our investments and performance accessible in an easy-to-use dashboard (take a look here).

We leveraged our role as the country’s fourth largest pension fund system to push companies to do better for workers, communities, and the planet. We led an investor coalition to deliver a stinging rebuke to the Amazon board member responsible for workforce oversight. We successfully pushed credit card companies to create a new merchant category code to help identify gun purchases that might lead to illegal activity.

As the office responsible for taking the long-term view, we brought extensive focus on the climate crisis. We called out BlackRock (our largest asset manager) for backsliding on their climate commitments and joined shareholder resolutions pushing banks to stop lending on fossil fuel expansion projects. We issued reports on the city’s too-slow progress on resiliency investments ten years after Superstorm Sandy and offered a vision for making basement apartments safer in the wake of more frequent storms. And we laid the groundwork for an innovative “public solar” approach to dramatically scale up rooftop solar in NYC.  

We worked with City Hall to clear the contract backlog and streamline procurement to get nonprofits and other vendors paid quicker, including improving upon our own contract processing times. Our audit of the NYC Ferry system found $224 million in spending that had been hidden, prompting systemic changes that would make Walt Whitman smile. We held townhalls in every borough to engage New Yorkers in our work to reform our inequitable property tax system and built a citywide coalition of elected officials to defeat the costly boondoggle that was the 421-a tax exemption – paving the way for smarter and more effective investments in genuinely affordable housing. We piloted a new participatory auditing approach to bring NYCHA residents into our work to hold the housing authority accountable.

That doesn’t even get to the 10,000+ claims we settled in lawsuits for and against the City to deliver fairness and protect the City’s fiscal resources, the nearly 20,000 contracts we registered to make sure no shortcuts were taken with our money, of the millions of dollars we recovered for workers who were cheated out of the prevailing wages they were owed.

Not bad for our first year of “accounting together.” My deepest thanks to every single person here at the Comptroller’s office who made it possible, and to all of you.

Best wishes for a bright start to the new year,  

Brad