Chair Lee on DOF racial equity plan and accessibility benchmarks
Lee asks how DOF measures progress toward its goal of making 100% of services accessible to underserved communities by 2026. Commissioner Lee and CFO James describe outreach efforts and note the report is not yet finalized, with tracking initiatives in development alongside the new deed theft prevention office.
Okay, moving to questions about racial equity.
So your agency's racial equity plan commits to ensuring that 100% of Department of Finance services become more
in quotes, it's easily accessible and readily available to New Yorkers, particularly in historically underserved communities by the end of 2026.
How is your agency measuring whether that goal is actually being achieved and what benchmarks are currently being used to track progress and are there any budget implications?
So the Department of Finance is moving towards efforts to do outreach.
We're focusing a lot on our mayor's office of D-DEFT.
We're appreciative of course recommendations and reviewing what steps that we as an agency have to take to better align with the goals of the initiative.
Yes, your agency submitted this.
So, again, I'll have our CFO, James, if you want to maybe go a little bit more.
So I just want to understand, like, how you all are tracking the progress set by the goal that you guys put forward.
So we're still working with the committee because the report has not been finalized yet.
It's supposed to be finalized like literally in a couple of weeks.
And then you guys have a goal to be 100% by 2026.
So we do have a community outreach program.
We do have initiatives already that's in place.
for tracking.
We will, once the report is completely final, we'll be able to work with the D-DEFT group that was just created.
It's still been established.
And some of the other outreach opportunities that we have to meet the goals that we've put in the plan.