Parks & Open Space
Too often, New York City’s parks, plazas, open streets, schoolyards, and natural areas spaces are managed in silos – subject to fragmented oversight, inconsistent funding, and missed opportunities for coordination and innovation.
Brad will reimagine public space as a citywide system that serves all New Yorkers – connecting parks to plazas, schoolyards to streets, and communities to the green infrastructure they deserve. Back to Issues
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After bringing participatory budgeting to NYC as a council member, Brad was frustrated — like many New Yorkers — at the slow pace of the City’s capital project construction. So he successfully championed Local Law 37 of 2020, which required the development of a user-friendly NYC Capital Projects Tracker to serve as a management tool to help get New York City’s schools, parks, bridges and roads built on time and on budget. As Comptroller he was a leading participant in the Capital Process Reform Taskforce, which successfully won legislative reforms in Albany to allow the City to build infrastructure faster, better, and cheaper.
Brad has also taken on the unequal distribution of parks and resources. In 2015, Brad sponsored Local Law 98 of 2015, to increase transparency, ensure more equitable distribution of resources, and help address disparities in park conditions across the city, requiring the Parks Department to publish detailed, quarterly data on park maintenance and capital projects.
As Comptroller, Brad’s hard-hitting audits and reports have exposed the failures of Mayor Adams’ approach to public safety, like sweeps of homeless encampments that place just 0.1% of people into permanent housing. Brad’s audit of ShotSpotter, a gunfire location and detection technology contracted by the NYPD, revealed that alerts only identified confirmed shootings 13% of the time.
As a trustee of the Police Pension Fund, Brad worked alongside union representatives to protect retirement security and ensure disability decisions were handled with integrity and consistency. Brad partnered with police unions to secure disability benefits for officers who contracted long Covid. He also fought to ensure that the family of Officer Adeed Fayaz, who was killed in the line of duty, received the death benefits they deserved.
Brad led the pension systems to call on American Express, MasterCard and Visa to support a proposal to establish a merchant category code (MCC) for gun and ammunition stores. The MCC code would allow financial institutions to both locate and report large purchases of firearms and ammunition – purchases that have the potential to be used for criminal purchases.