Good evening, commissioners and thank you for holding this hearing in Brooklyn. I admit I was hesitant to provide testimony tonight because the timeline for this Commission’s work feels extremely rushed, and I question whether meaningful public engagement on something as big as the City Charter can happen in the time allotted. However, the chance to examine the governing documents of our city is rare and important, so I want to take this opportunity to share two priorities that both would benefit from Charter change and are relevant to the themes that Mayor Adams has tasked you with reviewing: citywide comprehensive planning and support for community boards.
Planning for Public Safety
There is too wide a gap between how the City plans and how it invests in our communities. The Department of City Planning is limited by the lack of an explicit directive in the City Charter, and so they don’t plan, they zone. The Mayor’s recent efforts through the City of Yes proposals have revealed that our current City Charter only allows us to craft a chapter and not the entire book. We need to require the creation of a comprehensive planning framework that goes beyond zoning and supports the vision in the Charter’s preamble: “…to ensure that every person who resides in New York City has the opportunity to thrive…”
Comprehensive planning is a public safety issue. We get to safer communities by planning for them and investing in them. We know from our history that policies such as redlining generated cycles of investment in some neighborhoods and cycles of disinvestment in others. That is why today, someone born in East New York is expected to live until 79.3, while their counterpart born a 45-minute trip away by the 3 train in Brooklyn Heights is likely to live four years longer.
Last year, my office released The Comprehensive Plan for Brooklyn, which seeks to eliminate racial, spatial, and structural disparities for communities across the borough. It covers seven topics: Healthcare, Housing, Environmental Conditions, Active Living and Transit, Community Services, Jobs, and Accessibility. In each of these areas we see stark contrasts neighborhood to neighborhood in metrics such as life expectancy; school performance; access to parks and open space; the reach of transportation options; the safety of our streets; the air quality; and the prevalence of health challenges such diabetes, asthma, and maternal mortality and morbidity.
True public safety is not the absence of crime, it is the presence of a healthy, well-resourced, and well-planned community. We achieve true public safety for our city by creating conditions that don’t necessitate violence. The safest communities in the city are marked by the absence of encounters with police, not their presence. We should not be measuring how safe our communities are, but rather how just they are.
Research has well established the determinants of health. We know that a healthy community has access to high-performing schools, accessible parks and open spaces, diverse and affordable housing, well-paying jobs, and quality healthcare. A healthy community requires a healthy environment: one with clean air, clean streets, functional transit, and protection and mitigation from natural disasters.
We need to begin to think of public safety through a similar lens for justice that can better address the sources of violence that harm our communities, cut the lives of our neighbors down too early, and place the burden of mismanaged investment and growth strategies heavily on low-income communities of color. Changes to the City Charter can allow us to advance four forms of justice:
Environmental justice points us to the design of our streets to reduce collisions, deaths, and emissions; the coverage our tree canopy to reduce the dangers of extreme heat and poor air quality; and calls upon us to prepare for a changing climate. We need to create a more resilient city that places fewer people in harm’s way.
Structural justice asks us to create systems to address the overpolicing of some communities, the prevalence of vacant storefronts in some communities, the lack of affordable and habitable housing, disproportionate suspensions in our schools, and the lack of adequate screening for learning disabilities. We need to respond to community priorities by taking their needs more fully into account in our budgets, our systems, and our services.
Spatial justice demands that we address segregation in our city, which in some cases is upheld by our outdated zoning code. Your neighborhood shouldn’t determine your likelihood of experiencing or being proximate to gun violence, your ability to find affordable housing options, or your life expectancy. We need new approaches to direct growth, prioritize investment in communities, and address gaps in the levels of service, access, and choice.
Procedural justice challenges us to enforce the laws we have to prevent discrimination in housing and harassment of tenants, protect our civil rights, and practice real community oversight on the use of force by police. It involves understanding how we are being surveilled, monitored, and systemically marginalized. We need new commitments in the Charter that support enforcement agencies and policies such as the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the Human Rights Commission, and the Certification of No Harassment.
All of these issues reinforce one key idea: that comprehensive planning is a tool for advancing public safety. Comprehensive planning should be strengthened in the Charter by requiring, at minimum:
A new growth and retention strategy. The zoning map alone is insufficient to help communicate a plan for how we will accommodate future growth, retain critical employment centers, and guide development in the city. A Future Land Use Map would help us set forth a vision for how we anticipate change to happen while also ensuring greater alignment on, for example: preventing the erosion of land zoned for manufacturing, encouraging growth around key centers and transit, and implementing strategies to advance fair housing. This would provide another tool to prevent piecemeal planning decisions that are inconsistent with City priorities and policy.
A new approach to community engagement and investment. We need to think beyond ULURP as being one of the only mechanisms for communities to engage in planning and development conversations. That starts with a comprehensive citywide needs assessment that captures the real needs facing communities. We need to understand what our vision for a well-planned city requires and then follow that up with a 10-year capital plan to prioritize our investments in response to community priorities, with a focus on addressing longstanding needs in underserved neighborhoods and preparing for climate change.
Support for Community Boards
Robust and meaningful community engagement also depends on well-resourced and functioning community boards. The city’s 59 community boards play a critical role in the comprehensive planning framework outlined above and do so much more. They are an important link between the public and City government, weighing in on important issues that impact everything from small businesses to street safety to the availability of affordable housing. Yet these boards currently struggle with a confusing regulatory framework in the Charter and a lack of resources.
In practice, each community board is its own independent agency. However, due to their very small budgets, the boards cannot exercise the full complement of services generally performed by a City agency, including but not limited to procurement, human resources, and information technology support, without assistance. In fact, because of their extremely limited budgets – with no baselined increase since 2014 – the boards often find it difficult just to maintain their basic Charter-mandated functions.
Accordingly, the City Charter tasks both Borough Presidents and the Civic Engagement Commission (CEC) with providing technical assistance and training to community boards. However, my office is simply not funded to provide the full scope of the support and technical assistance that the boards need to meet and exceed their Charter-mandated functions, and the Civic Engagement Commission is facing major proposed budget cuts that will hinder their already limited work in this area.
The situation wherein three entities – the community boards themselves, the Borough Presidents’ Offices, and the CEC – all have a role in ensuring that the boards can carry out their duties, yet all three are underfunded and understaffed to do so, is why I am calling for the creation of a new Office of Community Boards that would become a central resource for assisting the boards with technology, policies and procedures, human resources, legal counsel, training, and other needs. No other City agency goes without vital support services, and the community boards should not have to, either. In addition to public safety, the Mayor has tasked this Commission with examining fiscal responsibility. Consolidating these roles into one agency makes sense practically and financially for the City.
To be clear, I am not suggesting this in order to shirk any responsibility that my office has to the boards we oversee. I take my responsibilities to appoint diverse and representative members to every Brooklyn board, to regularly convene the Borough Board, and to provide ministerial administrative support when needed very seriously. However, the scope of their needs falls outside what my office is funded to and has the staff to capacity to support. Examples of services that the Office of Community Boards could provide, which District Managers from across the city are asking for, include:
- Professional technical assistance in land use planning to inform the boards’ role in the ULURP and citywide comprehensive planning processes;
- Assistance with identifying new office space as needed and public meeting space that meets accessibility requirements;
- Human resources and legal support, including guidance on hiring and firing staff, approval of job postings, and training for both staff and board members on discrimination, harassment, and meeting procedures;
- Communications and technology support, including holding and livestreaming hybrid meetings (as boards are now required to do per State law), producing website and social media content, and creating flyers and mailers in multiple languages;
- IT and procurement support, including assistance with office computer issues, email and website creation and maintenance, purchasing, and paying bills;
- Equity and accessibility at meetings, including translation services, food, and childcare; and
- Supporting meaningful engagement from City agencies on the budget process.
We can’t be short-sighted in our views of public safety and fiscal responsibility. We will inherit the future we plan for and invest in. The City Charter issues a challenge to each of us, “…to act intentionally to remedy these past and continuing harms and to reconstruct, revise and reimagine our foundations, structures, institutions, and laws to promote justice and equity for all New Yorkers.”
Thank you again for holding this hearing today. I hope you will take these recommendations into consideration as you develop your proposed ballot measures.
