The Purpose of Public Authorities
Are they solutions to public problems or to governmental constraints?
During testimony at the first hearing of the Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE), Council Member Gale Brewer posed a question: How can we make the Department of Design and Construction (DDC) similar to the School Construction Authority (SCA) in its ability to deliver capital projects effectively?
Commissioner Kathy Wylde, the former CEO of the Partnership for New York City, responded with a different question: Isn’t the point of this commission to reduce the hurdles on agencies so we don’t have to rely on quasi-governmental entities like the SCA to deliver capital projects?
This exchange captures a debate that has followed public authorities for more than a century: when the government struggles to deliver, should we create institutions that operate outside traditional governmental constraints, or try to reform those constraints themselves?
On the evening of June 9, 2026, around 100 advocates, members of the press, and civics nerds (hi) piled into a large conference room at New York Law School for the first hearing of Mayor Mamdani’s new Charter Revision Commission: the Charter On Government Efficiency (COGE). Cheeky name aside, COGE was established to review the New York City charter -- our city’s governing document -- to “develop proposals to modernize City government, improve service delivery, and strengthen accountability to New Yorkers.” They will do this by traveling the city and holding public hearings and then deliberating. The resulting proposals for changes to the city charter will likely end up on our November ballots.
In this windowless room, two people at a time were called up to testify before the commission. Over the course of the evening, testimony ranged from procurement reform and the Mayor’s Management Report to open primaries and civil service changes.
Several days earlier on a beautiful early summer morning, I opened Gail Radford’s book “The Rise of the Public Authority” in preparation for starting a job at the New York City School Construction Authority later this month.
Public authorities are entities that exist outside the traditional channels of executive control and legislative appropriation. When you take the subway or fly out of one of NY’s 3 airports you are interacting with public authorities: the MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ), respectively. While the public most often interacts with authorities through public transportation, they can also do construction (NYC School Construction Authority, NYS Dorimtory Authority) and support economic development (Empire State Development Corporation), among other miscellaneous goals.
So why do we have public authorities? The common conception is that they exist because they deliver services more efficiently than a traditional government agency can, as they are allowed to be run like a business, often with non-partisan experts appointed to their boards. They also have the added strength of being able to generate revenue (as opposed to being appropriated funding from general tax funds), allowing them to escape political unpredictability and even raise capital by issuing revenue bonds, backed by the authorities’ revenue streams.
Radford argues that we are mistaken in this understanding of why they exist. She argues that when we look to history, we will find that public authorities were not created because agencies are inherently incapable of delivering services efficiency, but instead because progressive policy makers interested in doing more for the public good (often in ways that were often overwhelmingly popular with voting public), were left with no choice but to look outside of the government to develop structures to more effectively deliver services and infrastructure projects given constraints on agencies placed by city charters, state legislation, and the courts.
One such recurring problem was debt limits. New York governments often wanted to build infrastructure but faced constitutional or statutory restrictions on how much debt they could issue directly. Authorities provided a workaround: because they were legally separate entities, they could borrow money and finance projects without those obligations appearing on government balance sheets in the same way. What looks today like an administrative choice was often a response to legal and financial constraints.
Authorities also frequently escaped procurement, civil service, and approval processes that legislators had created to prevent corruption but which reformers increasingly viewed as barriers to building infrastructure at the speed they desired.
However, as Radford writes, “despite the appeal of authorities, the choice to build government capacity using what is essentially a strategy of circumvention comes with real costs. Chief among these is fragmentation of governance power, undermining the ability of elected officials to chart broad policy directions to promote balanced development and greater equality -- goals that the private sector is frequently incapable of achieving on its own.”
Back in the drabby room at New York Law School, when Gale Brewer asked how we could make the Department of Design and Construction (DDC) more similar to the School Construction Authority (SCA) in its ability to deliver capital projects effectively, we can understand that she is looking for ways past the constraints of government agencies to deliver more for the public.
Kathy Wylde’s response encapsulates the other side of the coin. Brewer’s question assumes that the SCA’s effectiveness stems from features unique to the authority model. Wylde’s response asks whether those features are unique to authorities, or are instead just freedoms that government agencies have been denied. We’ve spent decades building workarounds. Should charter reform focus on creating more workarounds, or should it remove the conditions that made them necessary?1
The exchange was particularly striking to me because in a few weeks I will begin work at the School Construction Authority itself. Before opening Radford’s book, I mostly thought of authorities in terms of what they do differently. After attending the hearing, I’m increasingly interested in what successful authorities reveal about the governmental systems they were created to work around.
Radford’s answer is that authorities emerged not because reformers disliked government, but because they were trying to accomplish things that existing governmental structures struggled to deliver. Faced with legal, institutional, and financial obstacles, many chose to work around them rather than confront them directly.
Or, as Mayor Ed Koch reportedly put it: “Authorities are the path of least resistance.”2
The question that COGE should be asking is what successful authorities reveal about where charter changes can improve efficiency.
There is only so much within the NYC Charter, much of it is controlled by the state legislature.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315289250-7/public-authorities-shape-decision-making-annmarie-hauck-walsh
Very excited to hear more about what you learn via your work at the SCA!