“Unless we embrace the full potential of flexible, cost-effective collaborations between the city and civic-oriented non-profits, moments like the QueensWay setback will become the norm, not the exception.“

City officials announcing funding for the QueensWay proposal in 2022. (Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)

Earlier this summer, New York City lost out on $112 million in federal funding for the QueensWay, a project championed by a community-driven partnership that is working to transform an abandoned rail corridor in Queens into a vibrant new greenway. It was a devastating setback for a project that promised health, mobility and environmental benefits in one of the city’s most park-starved boroughs.

But the damage goes beyond the project itself and extends to the urgency and need we face in fostering and funding more partnerships that bring together the city and community-based non-profits. No matter who wins this fall’s mayoral election, we must address a housing crisis, modernize failing infrastructure, expand our parkland and build a more resilient, equitable city. 

It’s a lot to get done, but unless we embrace the full potential of flexible, cost-effective collaborations between the city and civic-oriented non-profits, moments like the QueensWay setback will become the norm, not the exception.

The Central Park Conservancy was a pioneer in this space more than 40 years ago, when the organization was founded to address decades of public disinvestment in Central Park, one of the most treasured public spaces in the world. The Great Lawn had become a dustbowl, the Harlem Meer a trash-strewn mud puddle, while graffiti marred virtually every structure and rock outcropping.

Over the years, the Conservancy has slowly restored the Park to its current, glorious state, culminating with the opening last spring of the Davis Center—a new pool and rink in Harlem that the Conservancy managed and delivered on time and on budget, thanks to a $60 million investment by the city and $100 million in private funding. 

Others have followed a similar path over the decades—from the High Line to Moynihan Train Hall and the new LaGuardia Airport. These new icons of our cityscape show what’s possible when the public sector sets priorities and the private sector helps deliver them. We can transform long-stalled plans into lasting civic assets.

To be sure, partnerships must be structured with transparency and accountability, and never in a way that elevates private interests over the public good. This is not about “privatizing” the public resources; it’s about harnessing private resources to enhance the public realm.  

The private sector can bring creative solutions, technical expertise, flexibility and long-term commitment that are often difficult to marshal within traditional public systems. But it’s the partnership—the alignment of public mission and private ingenuity—that enables these projects to succeed at the scale New Yorkers need.

It’s an approach that can be just as effectively applied to some of the city’s most pressing challenges—from housing to transit to climate infrastructure. Investing in 500,000 new units of housing, realizing a modernized Penn Station, and preparing communities to withstand intensifying storms all require imaginative thinking and funding well beyond what the city alone can muster, especially at a time when federal funding for urban projects is becoming less reliable and more erratic.

We also must not lose sight of forward-looking opportunities, such as the Interborough Express (IBX)—a transformative project that would connect transit deserts across Brooklyn and Queens. RPA has championed this project for years because it would reduce commute times, expand job access, and better connect millions of New Yorkers. To bring it to life, we’ll need serious investment—and creative partnerships to match.

New York is not alone in developing this approach. Los Angeles has leveraged partnerships to expand its Metro system. Chicago rebuilt and activated its Riverwalk through blended financing. Cities from London to Sydney are building the future through collaborations that align public interest with private capacity.

This is one of the most critical inflection points in our city’s modern history.  The next mayor has a rare opportunity to turn bold plans into lasting progress. But that will only happen if we use every tool at our disposal and build a city that works for all. 

New York’s infrastructure is not just about roads, rails or parks. It’s about people, possibility and the kind of city we choose to be. If we want to leave future generations with a more livable, just and connected New York, we must be bold enough to build it together.

That means embracing new models, removing unnecessary barriers and seizing every opportunity to align civic vision with collective investment. Our greatest moments of transformation have always come from this kind of partnership. The next administration has the opportunity to lead in that tradition—and to leave a legacy worthy of this city’s promise.

Tom Wright is president and CEO of Regional Plan Association (RPA). Betsy Smith is the president and CEO of the Central Park Conservancy.

The post Opinion: Funding Infrastructure That New Yorkers Deserve appeared first on City Limits.

There have been 50 threats so far this year to Minnesota officials State Patrol Lt. Colonel Jeremy Geiger reported during a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Capitol Area Security earlier this week.

The meeting Monday was the third since the assassination of Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, as well as the attempted assassination of Sen. John Hoffman, his wife Yvette and their daughter Hope on June 14.

Geiger said the Capitol received 19 threats in 2024, and that in 2025, the State Patrol has already received 50 threats — 13 of which have resulted in criminal charges. In response, he said the State Patrol is appointing one of their officers in December to work with the BCA to investigate those threats.

“We’re not going to stop, we’re not going to kind of throw up our hands at some point and say, ‘Well, we’re done. Now we can just move on,’ ” he said. “This has been and will be a constant commitment to not only the people in this room but … the public who come and visit, everybody who comes on to this complex.”

Two of those threats made headlines following the lawmaker shootings in June. On June 17, a man was arrested and charged with allegedly threatening violence at the Capitol. On July 25, another man broke into the Capitol on several occasions and was found naked in the Senate Chamber.

Also Monday, the committee discussed other states’ open carry policies, heard from a firm that is working on a third-party review of the Capitol’s security and discussed whether lawmakers should be practicing active shooter drills in their chambers.

“This is something where we all should be prepared. And you know, know that this is never anything that we want to have to face, but we need to be ready,” said Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, chair of the committee. “And unfortunately, there are second and third graders who are familiar with how to conduct themselves in an incident like this. We also need to … be ready.”

The State Patrol has hired 20 new Capitol security officers who will start training in November, Geiger said. Other security changes include updated cameras and “security kiosks.”

The advisory committee is expected to meet again in “about a month,” Flanagan said Monday. The committee is expected to send recommendations to the Legislature for any security updates to the Capitol to potentially be passed in the 2026 session.

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By WYATTE GRANTHAM-PHILIPS, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — It’s a tough time for the job market.

Amid wider economic uncertainty, some analysts have said that businesses are at a “no-hire, no fire” standstill. That’s caused many to limit new work to only a few specific roles, if not pause openings entirely. At the same time, some sizeable layoffs have continued to pile up — raising worker anxieties across sectors.

Some companies have pointed to rising operational costs spanning from President Donald Trump’s barrage of new tariffs and shifts in consumer spending. Others cite corporate restructuring more broadly — or, as seen with big names like Amazon, are redirecting money to investments like artificial intelligence.

In such cases, “it’s not so much AI directly taking jobs, but AI’s appetite for cash that might be taking jobs,” said Jason Schloetzer, professor business administration at Georgetown University’s McDonough School. He pointed to wider “trade offs” from employment to infrastructure investment seen across companies today.

Federal employees have encountered additional doses of uncertainty, impacting worker sentiment around the job market overall. Shortly after Trump returned to office at the start of the year, federal jobs were cut by the thousands. And many workers are now going without pay as the U.S. government shutdown nears its fourth week.

“A lot of people are looking around, scanning the job environment, scanning the opportunities that are available to them — whether it’s in the public or private sector,” said Schloetzer. “And I think there’s a question mark around the long-term stability everywhere.”

Government hiring data is on hold during the shutdown, but earlier this month a survey by payroll company ADP showed a surprising loss of 32,000 jobs in the private sector in September.

Here are some companies that have moved to cut jobs recently.

Amazon

Amazon said Tuesday that it will cut about 14,000 corporate jobs, close to 4% of its workforce, as the online retail giant ramps up spending on AI while trimming costs elsewhere. A letter to employees said most workers would be given 90 days to look for a new position internally.

CEO Andy Jassy previously said he anticipated generative AI would reduce Amazon’s corporate workforce in the coming years. And he has worked to aggressively cut costs overall since 2021.

UPS

United Parcel Service has disclosed about 48,000 job cuts this year as part of turnaround efforts, which arrive amid wider shifts in the company’s shipping outputs.

In a Tuesday regulatory filing, UPS said it’s cut about 34,000 operational positions — and the company announced another 14,000 role reductions, mostly within management. Combined, that’s much higher than the roughly 20,000 cuts UPS forecast earlier this year. UPS also said it closed daily operations at 93 leased and owned buildings during the first nine months of this year.

Target

Last week, Target that it would eliminate about 1,800 corporate positions, or about 8% of its corporate workforce globally.

Target said the cuts were part of wider streamlining efforts — with Chief Operating Officer Michael Fiddelke noting that “too many layers and overlapping work have slowed decisions.” The retailer is also looking to rebuild its customer base. Target reported flat or declining comparable sales in nine of the past eleven quarters.

Nestlé

In mid-October, Nestlé said it would be cutting 16,000 jobs globally — as part of wider cost cutting aimed at reviving its financial performance.

The Swiss food giant said the layoffs would take place over the next two years. The cuts arrive as Nestlé and others face headwinds like rising commodity costs and U.S. imposed tariffs. The company announced price hikes over the summer to offset higher coffee and cocoa costs.

Lufthansa Group

In September, Lufthansa Group said it would shed 4,000 jobs by 2030 — pointing to the adoption of artificial intelligence, digitalization and consolidating work among member airlines.

Most of the lost jobs would be in Germany, and the focus would be on administrative rather than operational roles, the company said. The layoff plans arrived even as the company reported strong demand for air travel and predicted stronger profits in years ahead.

Novo Nordisk

Also in September, Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk said it would cut 9,000 jobs, about 11% of its workforce.

Novo Nordisk — which makes drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy — said the layoffs were part of wider restructuring as the company works to sell more obesity and diabetes medications amid rising competition.

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ConocoPhillips

Oil giant ConocoPhillips has said it plans to lay off up to a quarter of its workforce, as part of broader efforts from the company to cut costs.

A spokesperson for ConocoPhillips confirmed the layoffs on Sept. 3, noting that 20% to 25% of the company’s employees and contractors would be impacted worldwide. At the time, ConocoPhillips had a total headcount of about 13,000 — or between 2,600 and 3,250 workers. Most reductions were expected to take place before the end of 2025.

Intel

Intel has moved to shed thousands of jobs — with the struggling chipmaker working to revive its business as it lags behind rivals like Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.

In a July memo to employees, CEO Lip-Bu Tan said Intel expected to end the year with 75,000 “core” workers, excluding subsidiaries, through layoffs and attrition. That’s down from 99,500 core employees reported the end of last year. The company previously announced a 15% workforce reduction.

Microsoft

In May, Microsoft began began laying off about 6,000 workers across its workforce. And just months later, the tech giant said it would be cutting 9,000 positions — marking its biggest round of layoffs seen in more than two years.

The latest job cuts hit Microsoft’s Xbox video game business and other divisions. The company has cited “organizational changes,” with many executives characterizing the layoffs as part of a push to trim management layers. But the labor reductions also arrive as the company spends heavily on AI.

Procter & Gamble

In June, Procter & Gamble said it would cut up to 7,000 jobs over the next two years, 6% of the company’s global workforce.

The maker of Tide detergent and Pampers diapers said the cuts were part of a wider restructuring — also arriving amid tariff pressures. In July, P&G said it would hike prices on about a quarter of its products due to the newly-imposed import taxes, although it’s since said it expects to take less of a hit than previously anticipated for the 2026 fiscal year.

Remember when Elon Musk and President Donald Trump were saying that tens of millions of dead people received Social Security benefits?

It was pretty clear from the outset that this claim, which implied that the Social Security Administration could save hundreds of billions of dollars a year just by removing the deceased from its rolls, was false.

As Social Security’s Office of the Inspector General had detailed in a series of reports over the previous decade, tens of millions of centenarians are not marked as dead in Social Security’s Numident file of everyone who has ever been issued a Social Security number — mostly because they died before the current automated death-reporting system was installed — but the number receiving benefits was, as of 2020, a perfectly reasonable 44,000, about half the estimated number of people that old in the U.S.

Lee Dudek, the midlevel Social Security employee elevated to acting commissioner by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, acknowledged as much in March. But he also said the agency was making “significant progress in identifying and correcting beneficiary records of people 100 years old or older,” encouraging hopes that the death patrol might still have a noticeable effect on Social Security rolls.

Well I just looked and couldn’t see any effect. Instead, the number of retired-worker Social Security beneficiaries 99 and older rose 2,745 from mid-2024 to mid-2025, the biggest such gain in five years. More noteworthy, the total number of Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance program beneficiaries — mostly retired workers but also their spouses, dependents and survivors — is up 1.7 million from January through August, more than its full-year gain in 2024.

This year’s sudden acceleration in beneficiary growth is even more striking when you look at percentage changes.

The decline after March 2020 was due to COVID-19, which over the past five years or so has killed 848,503 Americans ages 62 (the youngest age one can claim Social Security retirement benefits) and older, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I mention this because it shows what the impact of removing hundreds of thousands of people from the Social Security rolls looks like. A study this year by four economists found that premature deaths caused by the pandemic saved Social Security $156 billion.

This year’s rise in beneficiaries is driven not by a sudden decline in mortality but by a 12% increase in new Old-Age and Survivors Insurance beneficiary awards. Average benefits paid are also up, by 4.5%, and the resulting increase in Social Security outlays is a main reason that federal spending is up nearly 9% since Trump took office despite canceled grants and programs, layoffs and a government shutdown. Far from discovering and correcting massive waste at Social Security, Musk has left behind and Trump has continued to preside over big spending increases.

That’s ironic. It would be even more ironic if this year’s increase in Social Security claims were Musk and Trump’s fault, and there is a theory going around to that effect. After looking into the numbers, my sense is that bipartisan legislation signed into law by President Joe Biden on Jan. 5 and widely condemned by retirement-policy experts as “terrible” has been a much bigger driver of the increased claims.

The Trump-and-Musk-are-to-blame theory is that the chaos surrounding Musk’s temporary Social Security takeover, coupled with general unease about the future of the program, has led Americans to rush to file for benefits this year while there are still some to be had. There is some evidence for this: In a June AARP poll, 12% of the 50-and-older respondents said that in the past year they had “considered claiming or decided to claim” benefits earlier than previously planned, with many citing concerns about Social Security’s viability and its Musk-exacerbated customer-service problems.

“Earlier than planned” is hard to capture in the Social Security statistics, but we can look at the number of people and share of the population claiming retirement benefits at 62, 63 and 64. It’s definitely up, but (1) the increase so far is quite small and (2) the inflection point after years of declines seems to have come in 2023 or 2024, not this year.

More people claiming Social Security in their early 60s won’t have a negative long-term impact on the program’s finances because benefits are reduced with each year of claiming benefits before age 70. Those reduced benefits could be a problem for the early claimants, though, especially because in the past these have tended to be people of modest means who retired involuntarily because they couldn’t find a job or their work had become too physically demanding.

The recent increases in Social Security filings by 62-year-olds have been sharpest among those with high earnings, according to a Social Security Administration analysis from April (which was taken offline by the agency but has been preserved by the Wayback Machine), a trend that I don’t have a good explanation for although the numbers of people involved are probably so small that maybe I don’t need one.

According to that same April analysis, the biggest recent percentage increases in new Social Security claims have been among people 71 and older with low Social Security earnings. That’s where the new Biden-signed law with the Orwellian name Social Security Fairness Act comes in. In short it’s a repeal of earlier laws that tried to equalize overall retirement payouts between (1) those who worked primarily in state and local government jobs not covered by Social Security but also had some Social Security earnings, and (2) those who had only Social Security earnings.

Now a few million former state and local government workers and their spouses and widow(er)s will receive bigger retirement payouts than people with identical earnings that were covered entirely by Social Security, with the resulting increase in benefits the main reason the trustees of the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance trust funds this year moved up the date when the funds are expected to run out and Social Security beneficiaries start receiving reduced payments from 2035 to 2034. Great work, everybody!

Most of the beneficiaries of this windfall were already receiving Social Security and are now simply receiving higher monthly payouts. Because the law was retroactive to 2024, they also received one-time retroactive payments that, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Jonathan Levin wrote in May, helped explain a lot of the US economy’s resilience over what might otherwise have been a difficult spring. But there were also Fairness Act beneficiaries who now for the first time had reason to apply for Social Security, a condition most prevalent among spouses and widow(er)s of former state and local government workers.

As of mid-April, the Social Security Administration was reporting that it had processed 156,528 new claims related to the Social Security Fairness Act. My request for updated numbers has so far gone unanswered (the government is shut down, after all), but assuming that the claims kept coming in at a steadily slowing pace through the end of August got me to an estimate of nearly 325,000, or about three quarters of the overall increase in new Old-Age and Survivors Insurance benefits awarded through August compared with the period a year earlier. More-timely data on retirement insurance applications through September shows that since May they’ve subsided to levels similar to last year and 2023.

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”