CM Wong on Office of Community Safety operations and spending

Thank you, Chair.

Regarding the Office of Community Safety, okay, the executive plan includes a baseline transfer of 3.2 million city funding, 17 budgeted positions starting in fiscal 28 from DOHMH to OCS.

That's clear.

But my question is,

The Office of Community Safety launched on March 19th with 260 million and two staffers.

And the FY27 executive plan brings that to $270 million.

So my question is, what has the Office of Community Safety actually done since March 19th?

Can you answer that?

Thank you very much for that question, Councilmember.

We're going to defer questions on the Office of Community Safety with regard to what they've been doing in actions to that office.

What I can tell you is, from our standpoint, we've already begun doing the work of talking with them and figuring out how to synergize our efforts.

And so we know that they're hard at work trying to figure this out behind the scenes.

Yeah, what programs are operating under it today that were not operating before?

And how is it like different from Thrive NYC?

You know, like so much money was spent and then there's very little got accomplished.

Please answer that.

Yeah.

Do you mean for Office of Community Mental Health or Office of Community Safety?

Yes, Community Safety, yeah.

Okay, got it.

You know, the details and sort of the programming, I'm going to have to leave to that office and leadership there.

However, we do know a couple of very important things.

The Be Heard program will be completely, you know, operated by that office, and we look forward to working with the leadership of that office to make sure that program is as successful as it can be.

Yeah, well, I'm not opposed to the concept, but $270 million with no defined operational model is not a mental health program.

It's just a press release.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Okay, Councilmember Ressler.