New York City is the largest city in the USA with nearly 9 million people, but we’re also the beating heart of the nation’s largest “metropolitan area” with over 23 million people, extending north to Albany, south and west to include the five largest cities in New Jersey, north and east to include six of Connecticut’s largest cities, Long Island and five counties in Pennsylvania.
Our city’s ability to resolve some of our most important issues — housing, transit, energy costs, pollution and more — all require regional solutions. But coordinating between the 30+ counties and four states in the New York Metropolitian Area (NYMETA) isn’t happening efficiently. Nonprofits, commissions and multi-government “authorities” made big decisions with little public input, and giant coordination gaps exist that make things like NYC subway construction exceedingly expensive and inefficient.
That’s why, as Public Advocate, we will launch a metro-regional coordination project to document all the current ways our regional governments are coordinating, to recommend further coordination and to establish a small team who will help implement those recommendations.