CM on Fifth Avenue resurfacing and public realm funding

Last set of questions.

Oh, I think I see my former staff in the audience.

Milo, how you doing?

Nice to see you.

I'm going to turn it to just a few questions.

Resurfacing Fifth Avenue.

The executive plan includes additional city funds of $453,000 in fiscal 2026 only to resurface Fifth Avenue.

What will this funding be used for?

Please be specific.

So ahead of the capital project that's happening on Fifth Avenue, we wanted to make sure that the service has a good riding service ahead of FIFA and other events.

So that is why there was specific funding added for expense resurfacing of Fifth Avenue.

If it's just resurfacing, why isn't this capitally eligible?

So resurfacing by itself is capital eligible, Chair, but because the capital project is coming up, we didn't want to mess with the capital eligibility of the larger Fifth Avenue project.

If we paved it with capital funds, it would basically preclude us from coming back to do the capital streetscape project for a certain amount of time, and we didn't want to preclude it.

Okay.

Regarding public realm, $6.4 million in city funding was baseline starting in fiscal 27 for public realm programs.

Will this funding just be used to support open streets at its current level, or will it be used to expand the program?

Yes, so first we're very grateful that the funding was baseline, so we're not going year to year anymore and not knowing what's coming up.

So that's a really important investment to us to be able to plan.

And as the commissioner said earlier, we do see the program growing.

It's bigger at this point this year than it was last year, and it's not constrained by the money.

We've always been able to do whatever has been needed, even if we have to move some money around internally.

So we're committed to growing the program, and not just from a money perspective, but providing

programming where it's needed.

We've been working a lot on process to make sure that partners get paid much faster.

I think the money and the long-term planning enable us to be able to do much more in terms of working closely with those partners.

So fair to say it is expanding?

Yeah, we don't turn anyone away because of money.

What other plaza programs will receive funding, if any?

So we are committed to expanding our plaza program, and we have an applicant-based process for that every year.

And as part of that, we have our plaza equity funds, or sorry, our public space equity funds, because it goes beyond plazas now.

And so we want to make sure that whoever has an idea for a plaza, we can work with them, whether to test it short-term as an open street, whether to eventually build it out capitally, to provide ongoing maintenance support.

This is something we're very committed to as an agency.