Opinion: With another Trump presidency on the horizon, NYC needs to pay its damn bills

Dear Mayor Adams,

I apologize for writing you an open letter, but time is short, and this is the fastest way to get you a message. Even before the election, I was deeply distressed about the condition of New York’s nonprofit sector. Long-standing nonprofits are failing – Cause Effective, IOBY, Hester Street, SAALT – with many more at the edge of the abyss, having already furloughed or laid off staff. One contributing factor in many of these distressed situations is late payment by New York City. Things have become worse of late because the Passport migration was botched; your Office of Management and Budget cut funding for your Office of Contract Services; and there are staffing shortages at all levels of your government. With so many i-dotting and t-crossing positions unfilled, it’s hard to get the money out the door even though your staff are trying.

The election of Donald Trump has made the outlook bleaker for nonprofits as social service funding vital to New Yorkers – WIC, SNAP, TANF, HeadStart - will likely come under pressure just as needs go up. Given all this, I have one simple plea for the sake of New Yorkers: pay your damn bills. Your nonprofit partners need the money you owe them and paying the bills is relatively easy. It’s not the migrant crisis. It’s not repairing the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. It’s not addressing the housing shortage. It’s not closing Rikers. The Feds pay their bills on time, and New York can too if you make it a priority. Sure, the amounts seem large – according to the data in PASSPort Public, you owe nonprofits more than $500 million for work done under more than 1,900 contracts that remain unregistered not to mention late payments for contracts that are registered –  but it’s a drop in the bucket when your total budget is more than $110 billion.

If you don’t pay, we are screwed because, in addition to pressures from the incoming Trump White House, the scandals beleaguering your administration risk creating a misguided over-reaction of additional regulations and butt-covering that could set New York’s nonprofits back for decades. Much of today’s procurement nonsense was largely an ineffective, over-reaction to the Donald Manes scandal of the late 1980s. We don’t want history to repeat itself when so many people have worked hard over the last 15+ years to chip away at that painful legacy.

And please don’t let anyone gaslight you into thinking that loan funds can miraculously bridge nonprofits waiting to get their money. Yes, there are a few funds around (in fact, we run one of them). However, the amounts you owe are way too big for them (and how would nonprofits pay the interest?). In theory, you might be able to cobble together a large public-private partnership to help address the issue involving the city, philanthropy, and financial institutions but it would take years.

Nonprofits can’t make you pay their bills. It’s completely your choice. Most mission-driven nonprofit leaders are reluctant to complain publicly for fear of losing the city contracts that, despite catastrophic payments delays, allow them to advance their mission to serve New Yorkers. (I think some may even suffer from a nonprofit version of Stockholm Syndrome.)

Finally, clearing the payment backlog – loudly and proudly – would give you a well-deserved public victory that even the City Council would get behind given that Council Members Justin Brennan and Althea Stevens have proposed a bill to encourage you to do that same thing. It would also show post-election critics that the city can get things done. I know your senior people are focused on the issue but we need some brave out-of-the-box thinking such as executive orders, emergency procurement actions, and general head-banging with your subordinates in the agencies, OMB, the Law Department, and MOCs. But it would be an amazing act of leadership, and with the Trump Tsunami only 60 days from making landfall in New York, it’s now or never.

You ran as the “Get Stuff Done” Mayor, so get it done.