Assistant Vice President

Economic Development Corporation preliminary budget hearing: the signals - and the stakes. On March 17, 2026, the New York City Council's Committee on Economic Development held a budget oversight hearing for the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) with Committee Chair Virginia Maloney leading a sweeping review of EDC's borough-wide portfolio at a moment of fiscal pressure, federal uncertainty, and growing demand for accountability on job quality and equity. Watch the hearing video. 1. Big capital agenda. Workforce still secondary: EDC outlined a borough-wide pipeline - Kingsbridge, Hunts Point, Brooklyn Marine Terminal, Willets Point, Staten Island North Shore - focused on housing, green infrastructure, and food access. Workforce was meaningfully included, but still not positioned as a core metric. 2. Fiscal pressure is real - and unresolved: Council pressed on the Moody's downgrade, weak job growth outside healthcare, outdated federal data, and federal funding risks. EDC projected resilience but acknowledged data gaps and uncertainty. 3. City-run grocery plan raises cost questions: The city-owned grocery store initiative dominated the back half of the hearing and revealed significant unanswered questions about long-term costs. EDC confirmed $70 million in capital funding for five stores (one per borough), with a third-party operator model under development. What comes next: its take on what it will take. First, EDC has put a clear stake in the ground on workforce - but the system around it needs to catch up. Interim President Jeanny Pak described workforce development as one of EDC's four strategic pillars and named several active programs. EVP ShehilaRae Stephens elaborated: "EDC has been very intentional about creating pipelines to innovative industries that are going to be able to provide long-term stability and financial growth for New Yorkers - and that is really aligned with our efforts around improving job quality and trying to get New Yorkers to a space where they're able to sustain jobs at a livable wage." That framing now needs to translate into project-level accountability - starting with the site-specific job commitments tied to major capital projects. * Kingsbridge Armory (Bronx): 3,600 jobs projected, with a stated focus on local Bronx hiring. EDC cited a $216M city/state/federal investment and approval by the City Council last October. * Brooklyn Marine Terminal (Red Hook): 2,000 permanent jobs cited, anchored by a project labor agreement. Council Member Alexa Avilés challenged EDC directly: "What we have yet to see is a materialization of jobs, actual jobs from the property... I would like to see what jobs are resulting from any of this investment in the communities that directly abut all of these properties." * South Brooklyn Marine Terminal (Sunset Park): Described as over 90% complete, with "over 1,000 good-paying green collar and union jobs already created on site." * Hunts Point Produce Market ($405M redevelopment): EDC confirmed all existing jobs - "thousands of jobs up there, mostly union" - will be retained during construction, with the new all-electric facility projected online by the end of 2029. * BATWorks / Brooklyn Army Terminal: Named as the future home of "the largest green workforce training facility in New York City," connecting Sunset Park residents to green economy employment. * Spark Kips Bay (Manhattan): Described as a life sciences and health tech education hub where "students can attend high school, college, and advanced degree programs on the same campus" as medical and life sciences employers. Alongside these projects, EDC has made meaningful programmatic investments, though stronger connections to measurable outcomes will be important as this work evolves. EDC highlighted several programs by name: * East Brooklyn Workforce Fund: $1.4M investment launched October 2025; five CBOs selected to connect local job seekers to construction, green economy, and real estate sectors. * Hunts Point Economic Mobility Network: $1.4M investment, Greater Hunts Point EDC named as lead organization; focused on green economy and tech job pathways. * Sunset Park Economic Mobility Network: Launched June 2024; connecting workers to green economy, life sciences, manufacturing, and maritime jobs. * North Staten Island Northshore Fund RFP: Released February 2025; targeting workforce programs for young Staten Islanders on the Northshore. * Founder Fellowship: Fifth cohort recently announced; 400 entrepreneurs across 243 startups have raised over $170M in capital since 2022. * CUNY Startup Internship Program: 110 NYC-based students placed at 80+ startups in FY2025, with many receiving full-time offers. * Construct NYC / Waterfront Pathways: MWBE-focused construction pipeline programs offering technical and financial support to diverse firms accessing EDC contracts. Job quality and metrics - A gap in the record. Chair Maloney asked directly: "How does EDC conceive of its role in generating stronger job growth in the future, and how do we ensure that those jobs are high quality?" EDC's response referenced its programs but did not cite measurable targets. Council Member Avilés pushed further on industrial sector metrics: "Having one in three tenants doesn't say we are meeting growth targets... What is the growth target, and are we actually meeting that?" Child care as workforce infrastructure - an overlooked prerequisite. Council Member Jennifer Gutierrez pressed EDC on a gap conspicuously absent from its workforce framing: child care. "How is the city thinking about child care as part of its economic development strategy, particularly as a prerequisite for workforce participation?" EDC's response was notable: "Child care is needed for all workers to be able to go to their jobs and work every day... it's part of economic development. It can't be separated." From promises to proof: its Point of view. If workforce is going to sit at the center of economic development, it has to move from rhetoric to structure. Right now, NYC Employment and Training Coalition is still funding activity, not outcomes - layering programs across agencies without clear ownership, consistent metrics, or accountability. The result is predictable: jobs are promised, pipelines are named, but outcomes remain diffuse. What it will take is simple - and hard: set real targets for job quality and hiring, tie every capital dollar to enforceable workforce outcomes, and track it publicly so NYC Employment and Training Coalition know what's working. Align the system so employers shape demand, CUNY and providers deliver against it, and projects actually produce hires - not just headlines. And fund accordingly: not for participation, but for placement, retention, and wage growth. NYC Employment and Training Coalition'll know it's real when a groundbreaking includes developers, employers, nonprofits, city and state officials, and job seekers - because workforce isn't an add-on, it's built in from day one.

City lawyers admit BMT Task Force was advisory. Responding to a lawsuit claiming that the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) violated the New York State Open Meetings Law in creating the vision plan for the Brooklyn Marine Terminal redevelopment, the city admits for the first time explicitly that the task force - which voted to approve the plan in September of last year - was an advisory body. In a memorandum to the Kings County Supreme Court, city lawyers write, "Because the Task Force's determinations lacked delegated sovereign authority, its activities remained advisory in nature." While the city and others made it clear that further approvals were necessary once the vision plan had been voted through, both lawmakers and EDC officials have stated that the task force has final approval over the plan. "We understood that the decisions there were not binding," said Council Member Alexa Avilés, who served as co-vice chair on the task force. " However, what you hear from the other side is, 'Well, no, [the vision plan] can't be changed because that's what the [task force] approved." She added that the EDC, along with the Mayor and the task force chair, US Rep. Dan Goldman, used affirmative vote as evidence that the community approved of the plan. In a letter sent from the city and the EDC to elected officials on May 3, 2024 (before the redevelopment was announced to the public), it's stated that one of the task force's responsibilities are "to advise and approve on key planning priorities for the site and review and advise on and approve plan documents prior to their submittal for public approvals." Last September the task force voted to approve the vision plan for the redevelopment. The vote happened, as all previous task force meetings, behind closed doors. Over the year-long public engagement process, the only look the public got into the task force meetings came from leaks on Instagram and interviews in traditional media. It was decided early on to shut the public out of the task force meetings, Avilés said. She and others objected, asking that the public be allowed to listen in. The EDC immediately objected, and the sides reached a compromise in which summaries of the meetings would be made public. "Summaries are not useful when you're having substantive conversations. They're good for very limited purposes, but certainly did not meet a transparency threshold community members would have wanted and certainly deserved," the council member said. Arguing that the proceedings violated the New York State Open Meetings Law, three Columbia Waterfront District residents sued the city, asking the judge to pause further planning and throw out the "yes" vote. "When public land is on the line, the public has the right to be in the room. That is not a policy preference. It is the law," wrote attorney Michael C. Pope, lead counsel for the petitioners, in a Dec. 19 press release announcing the lawsuit. "What makes it particularly egregious is that during the two months in between [July and September], the plan changed because people flipped their votes. [The vision plan] wasn't brought back to the community so that we could see the changes," John Leyva, longtime Columbia Waterfront resident and one of the petitioners, told the Red Hook Star-Revue. Leyva, who was a member of one of the BMT planning project's advisory groups, recalled that last December, over the course of a few weeks, the task force, the advisory groups, and the community all convened for separate meetings, in which they were all presented with a separate set of facts. "We can't even have a coherent conversation because the community has one set of information, the advisory group has another set of information, and the task force has another set of information," Leyva said. "They did all this on purpose. This was not their first rodeo; they knew what they were doing." In the response to the suit, Muriel Goode-Trufant, corporation counsel for the City of New York, wrote to the court, "The Vision Plan's development was a uniquely open process." A key piece of evidence for the petitioners is a letter from the New York State Committee on Open Government, stating that the task force's meetings are subject to the Open Meetings Law. The city, though, argues that the committee's statements are non-binding and that the petitioner did not provide the committee with all the facts; Goode-Trufant also notes that the city wasn't provided a copy of the letter until the lawsuit was filed. In the letter, Kristin O'Neill, deputy director and counsel at the Committee on Open Government, wrote that she had studied EDC's own description of the task force, as well as information from the City Council. "If the information I have reviewed is accurate... this Task Force has been given the authority to approve the NYC EDC's plan for redevelopment of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal," O'Neill wrote. Given that the task force also consisted of more than three people and was "charged with a public duty to be performed by them jointly," the task force, thus, "is a public body that must comply with the Open Meetings Law," wrote O'Neill. The city also contends that annulling the vote is an "unwarranted and extreme remedy" and that the petitioners "seek to undo one year of public engagement, and the community's collaborative development of a plan to reimagine its waterfront space." But to Leyva and the other petitioners, the community was never meaningfully involved in developing a vision plan. "We just feel like the only way to do this is just to do it over again," Leyva said. EDC spokesperson Jeff Holmes said in an email that they aren't able to comment on ongoing litigation.