CM Abreu on OmniCard pilot for students

Majority Leader Bray, followed by Councilmember Ressler.

And I'm just trying to be mindful of time so we can keep both questions and responses as succinct as possible.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Lee.

And thank you, Mr.

Chancellor, for being here today.

There's been a push for CUNY students to receive free Omni cards to help them get to and from classes.

Can you please talk a bit about some of the challenges students face currently and if there's been any discussion with the administration on this?

So thank you for that.

We actually found the number of maybe 3,100 students.

We got asked before about for the pilot that we put in the green sheet, how many students would benefit.

So that is the number.

That is the number.

We want to make sure that as many students who need the OmniCards to get to class, but not just to get to class, but also to be able to go to paid internships, to be out there connecting to the programs that we have so they can be fully participating.

We want to try to maximize what programs already exist, like encouraging students to be part of fair fairs.

If that's something that they qualify from.

So we're trying to take a holistic approach to cover as many students as we can with that very basic support.

And what's the price tag for that?

For the pilot, what we're asking the council was $750.

Okay.

We would love to see that in the adopted budget.

As the chair of the Transportation Committee, this is something that we find very, very important.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Chancellor.

Okay, great.