At New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection, critical infrastructure information lay in papers piled on engineers’ desks and in stacks of handwritten index cards, some dating back more than a century. Today, that data is digitized and being used to target lead pipe replacements, secure federal funding and streamline permitting.
That’s largely thanks to the work of DEP Assistant Commissioner Janet Aristy, who has spent nearly three decades quietly modernizing how the agency operates. By creating data systems, partnering with academics and think tanks, and introducing AI into the agency’s operations, Aristy has helped create proactive infrastructure management while preserving institutional knowledge.
Aristy started her career with DEP as a high school sophomore. Growing up in the Jackson Heights neighborhood in Queens, New York, she said she naturally gravitated to architectural preservation and environmentalism. She would make sketches of pre-war buildings for display in their lobbies and volunteer for beautification projects. A guidance counselor noted her interests and recommended that she apply for the city Department of Education’s Cooperative Education Program, a career-exploration internship.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just knew that I wanted to make my mom proud and be a good member of society and help others,” Aristy said. “My love language is acts of service. It always has been.”
Given the choice between an internship with a Wall Street firm or a government agency, Aristy chose public service. People told her a civil service job would be easy, she said. She found it to be the exact opposite. She also decided to change the stereotype that people have of city workers and prove “that civil servants are not people who just do their eight hours and leave for the day.”
Aristy worked at DEP most days after school, even though her internship didn’t require it, she said. She created filing systems to help clear the piles of papers from the engineers’ desks and developed a tracking database to make engineering logbook information easily retrievable. She was a sounding board for the agency’s engineers, she said. “I didn’t necessarily speak their language, but I could take the information they provided to me and simplify it and put it in a way to be able to communicate to others.”
2 million index cards
Twenty-eight years later, Aristy’s still at DEP. She became the agency’s assistant commissioner of business operations, core services and digital transformation on Dec. 31.
Most of the people Aristy started her career with have retired, but she’s finding ways to preserve their legacy even as she moves the agency toward a digital future.
Aristy partnered with Cornell University and the Environmental Tech Lab, a public-private partnership, to bring academic and technology expertise to the agency’s operations. That effort leveraged geographic information systems, work-management systems and complaint data analytics to shift DEP from reactive to proactive infrastructure management, according to Anh Nguyen, an Urban Innovation Fellow with DEP, who nominated Aristy for the Smart Cities Dive Public Service Award. Aristy also deployed generative AI to extract and analyze information from scanned documents, “a practical application that unlocked institutional knowledge buried in paper files,” Anh wrote.
Preserving institutional knowledge is “one of the things I would like to leave as a mark here,” Aristy said. “I’m trying to document all of the things that people poured into me, to move that forward for others so it doesn’t end with the tech.”
Notably, Aristy led the agency’s compliance efforts after the Environmental Protection Agency enacted its Lead and Copper Rule Improvements in 2024. That entailed sorting through and deciphering 2 million hand-written index cards dating back to the early 1900s — often until the wee hours of the morning, Aristy said.
The cards contained information about the lifecycle of service lines: when they were installed, repaired and replaced and what material the pipes were made from. “These records don’t just help us comply with the LCRI, they also support day-to-day operations such as leak investigations, giving field crews critical information about what's in the ground before they dig,” Aristy said.
A consultant has since taken over that process. Digitizing the records has been a game-changer in many ways, Aristy said. “It opened up the opportunity for us to look at environmental justice neighborhoods and those that we knew were underserved,” she said. “Having an inventory allowed us to apply for [EPA State Revolving Fund] grants to do no-cost [lead service line] replacements for those in need.”
Aristy’s leadership in digitizing DEP’s permitting system and taking applications online may have had the biggest impact, especially for the city’s contractors. Contractors previously had to make multiple trips to offices and agencies throughout the five boroughs to get permits, she explained. DEP is now building an AI system that optimizes inspectors’ routes, with hopes to eliminate on-site inspections altogether, Aristy said.
Empowering a team, leaving a legacy
What stands out most about Aristy “is not any single tool or platform,” Nguyen stated. “It’s the environment she has created.”
Aristy’s team “feels empowered to bring ideas forward, to pursue problems with curiosity, and to pilot solutions without fear of failure,” Nguyen said. Other colleagues at DEP agree.
Stephanie Fowler Buis, the supervisor of DEP’s business process analysis unit, has worked with Aristy since 2012. Aristy “is not a manager who sits back and just kind of directs people,” Fowler Buis said. “She really is hands on, and it’s very easy to give your all and get involved when you have leadership like that.”
For example, Fowler Buis said she recently worked on a contract for a working group involving several boroughs. Instead of Aristy presenting the contract to the group, she gave Fowler Buis feedback and let her present it. “She doesn’t micromanage,” Fowler Buis said. “She lets you figure it out on your own, but she’s still there if you need that guidance or help.”
Many people inside and outside of DEP turn to Aristy for guidance because she’s a problem-solver, said Chelsea McDermott, DEP’s chief of project management and online permitting for the Bureau of Water and Sewer Operations. “There’s never really a moment where I can’t go to Janet and say, ‘I have this problem,’” she said. “One of her strongest attributes is her strategic thinking and her ability to just say, ‘Here’s how we fix it.’ We get all sorts of problems from different places — whether it’s the commissioner’s office, the executive office, City Hall, other agencies, the state, even the federal government — and she always has a plan, even when it seems impossible.”
Aristy said her team calls her “the fixer” because she can “immediately come into a process and remove the noise and try to add clarity.” But she’s most gratified when her team members find ways to solve problems on their own.
“That energizes me because that means I’m leaving something in them,” she said. “The same way people left something in me, I can leave that with them and know the work will continue. They will continue to make changes and improve the system beyond me.”
