Friends of Heidi Harrison Chain
Office:
118-20 Queens Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375
Mailing address:
72-11 Austin Street
Box 420
Forest Hills, NY 11375
heidi@heidichain.com
Issues
Eliminate wasteful spending of our tax dollars
Heidi has worked in the New York City Department of Finance for 20 years. During that time she has acquired the experience and the understanding of the way the City works and how services are best delivered.
Heidi believes that we can eliminate wasteful spending of our tax dollars by increasing the efficiency of the way services are delivered to the community:
- Use the internet to file official forms where possible. Filing electronically will decrease costs and increase efficiency by:
- ensuring the correct input of data directly into the system;
- saving paper and be greener in the process; and
- decreasing costs of postage and paper.
- Change the renewal procedures for business licenses. For business entities that require license renewals, the city should allow them to update the prior year’s information rather than having to resubmit the same information each time. This will ease the work for the business entities and for the city.
- Increase the effectiveness of City employees and agencies by providing feedback to employees and the agencies - about the contracts that the city has with outside contractors and also feedback about the agency itself. In this way everyone can be held accountable for their work. In addition, the city will be able to determine whether it is better to have work performed by city employees rather than outsourcing the work to outside vendors. As an example the IRS did not renew the outside contract with collection agencies and is now having the IRS employees performing this work.
- Use computerized devices to issue violations to insure that the correct party is identified and the input is correct. This will minimize corrections and dismissed violations.
- Encourage innovation in public/private partnerships
- Encourage new public/private partnerships and provide incentives to the private sector for participation. These incentives may include providing free advertising for businesses and corporations that adopt and help the city provide some of the city services. This can be modeled on the “adopt a highway” program.
- One example could be to have plaques by trees, so that if you pay for a tree plaque to honor someone the payment goes to keep that area clean and thus better that area
- Another example could alleviate the risks of crossing Queens Boulevard: Allow businesses to help provide crossing guards for Queens Boulevard and give them a benefit for doing it
