We improved government efficiency and effectiveness by digitizing most of the Board of Estimates’ work product, eliminating paper submissions and excessive printing by moving the entire process online.

Our Department of Telecommunications and the Municipal Post Office each saved the City money this year, by taking advantage of technological opportunities to cut costs while improving services.

But we’re not done. Next term, we’re gonna take this all to the next level.

We’ll keep pushing to reign in the usage of emergency procurement, so as to promote openness and transparency in City spending. It’s wrong to spend hundreds of millions of dollars behind closed doors.

We’re going to create new dedicated websites for disclosing grant revenue and travel expenses and keep refining our OpenCheckbook site, to make it as useful and as user-friendly as possible.

But our most transformational effort will be our proposal to return administrative oversight of Accounting & Payroll, Revenue Collection, Procurement and Risk Management to our office and expanding our administrative oversight to include Treasury Management.

Placing most of the Finance Department back under the Comptroller will restore a sorely-needed check on an overly-strong-mayoral system. Perhaps just as importantly, it will put these crucial “back office” functions directly under the watchful eye of a citywide elected official, promoting maximum accountability.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              – Bill Henry