Chair Lee on contract renegotiations and naloxone cost savings

In terms of contract renegotiations, really quickly, the executive plan includes baselined reduction of $2.2 million starting in FY27 as part of contract renegotiations.

And so just wanted to know, were these contract reductions associated with the chief savings officer findings, or was it something separate?

Yeah, let me hand it over to Aaron to share more.

Okay.

Yeah, thanks, Chair Lee.

So, yes, that line item was part of the EO-12 savings reduction initiative.

Okay.

Yeah.

And then how many contracts and what type of contracts are being renegotiated?

Yeah, so we're still in the process of looking at that.

I think we, you know, this was based on a pretty...

reasonable, even maybe conservative assumption.

So we're in conversations right now with several different contracted vendors.

Okay.

And how will the services provided through these contracts be impacted by the renegotiations?

No impact or?

Yeah, I mean, our guiding premise for this entire exercise, as we testified earlier as well, is really minimizing or making sure that there are no service impacts to the public.

And so these contract renegotiations are also happening through that lens, and so there will be no service impacts.

Okay.

And I'm sorry, can you, I don't know if you answered this part, but what type of contracts?

I mean, we're looking across the board.

I mean, as you know, mental hygiene has an enormous portfolio.

A handful at least that we're looking at specifically.

Okay.

Obviously, we can't talk about them.

Okay.

Yeah.

If you could let us know and follow up, that would be awesome.

Happy to.

Yeah.

Okay.

So it also includes, the executive plan also includes reduction of $1.2 million starting in FY27 as part of a renegotiation of the naloxone contract.

Are the naloxone contract renegotiations also related to...

Reduction of services due to underutilization or why was that scheduled reduction baseline?

Yeah, so this is an incredibly important topic and one that I have to say, you know, the data is moving in the right direction when it comes to overdose deaths.

We're down 28% as, you know, in terms of our last recorded

year on file.

A lot of that is due to programs like this one.

I just want to plug one more time the program that I mentioned in my testimony, nyc.gov slash naloxone.

Any New Yorker can get online, put their information in, and get multiple units of naloxone shipped to them completely for free.

We were able to distribute about 285,000 kits over the course of the last year.

Let me hand it to Aaron to share a little bit more about the budget piece.

Yeah, thanks, Commissioner.

So this, I think, is actually a great example of how you can be creative when doing these savings exercises that are often pretty painful.

So the story with this one is just that naloxone has

come down in cost considerably over the past few years and it continues to and so we've seen it's already come down in our world quite a bit but we've seen other states California for example it's sort of hit record lows

and so we're watching very carefully what other states are doing around the country what other municipalities are doing and I think we're very confident that we're gonna see

additional savings here.

Okay, good to know.

It's a bit of good news, yeah.

Got it.