Good morning Chair Restler and members of the committee, and thank you for holding this hearing today. I am happy to see the Council giving its attention to community boards. I know that their reputation is mixed at best, but I can assure you that my Borough President colleagues and I are putting in the work to make sure their members are diverse, reflective of the communities they serve, and well-equipped for the role. That is why we are submitting joint testimony today on the proposed bills related to training, as well as Intros 1250, 1315, and 1316. So today I want to focus on other supports that community boards desperately need.
Our city’s 59 community boards serve a critical role as the foundation of our local democracy. The Charter mandates them with 22 responsibilities, including holding public hearings on issues facing their districts, creating annual Statements of District Needs and Budget Priorities, weighing in on local land use proposals, working with City agencies to communicate information to residents and evaluate service delivery, and much more. Yet due to chronic underfunding, community boards struggle to carry out these mandates, let alone day-to-day work. Most have very small staffs, with little money left over to hire other assistance, such as professional planners or tech support.
On top of that, the Charter’s framework for external support for community boards is confusing and scattered, calling on my office, the Civic Engagement Commission, and other agencies to provide various (and sometimes overlapping) support. However, no office receives enough funding to support the boards adequately or has supporting community boards as its primary mandate. This leaves our boards struggling to access basic services. For example, because OTI only has one staff person who supports all 59 boards, it can take the agency three or more months to create an email address, three years to remove one, and weeks to fix email access issues.
I recently submitted recommendations to the Commission to Strengthen Local Democracy for how we can better support our community boards through Charter change. These included:
- Increase community board office budgets for staffing and OTPS, so they can have at least three full-time, professional support staff, and money for updated technology, office supplies, and other needs.
- Create a separate Community Board Central Office, loosely based on the model of City Council’s Central Staff, to support boards in numerous areas, including land use and planning, communications and technology, real estate matters, human resources, procurement, legal support, and training. The CBCO (as my staff and I call it) would consolidate community board support, and because it would be an independent agency, its services would be consistent across both geography and time, and it would not be subject to political whims, directives, or budget cuts.
- Change the community board member appointment date from April 1 to August 1 and require new applicants to have attended at least one board meeting prior to applying.
The bills that Councilmember Restler is proposing today aim to address many (although not all) of the issues community boards face through legislation rather than Charter change. While I do think an independent agency is preferable for the reasons I explained, I would be willing to take more responsibility in my office for supporting the boards – if and only if there is dedicated funding attached. Otherwise Intro 1314 is an unfunded mandate that would do more harm than good for our boards. There are also potential conflicts-of-interest between my office and the community boards, which I stress are their own independent agencies, that would need to be addressed.
As noted above, I do support Intro 1318. The Charter currently sets April 1 of each year as the appointment deadline for new community board members. This date is impractical for two reasons: first it is in the middle of ongoing City budget negotiations, making it difficult for City Councilmembers to appoint new board members by the deadline, and dropping new board members into the middle of ongoing conversations without context. Second, new board members start their terms in May, meaning there are only one or two monthly meetings before the boards go on summer recess, making maintaining board membership after this break a challenge.
Additionally, District Managers are seeing a recurring problem where people apply to the board without having attended a meeting. These applicants often do not understand the role of a board member nor the required time commitment, leading to some members dropping off the board once they understand this more fully. Requiring applicants to attend a meeting to qualify for membership would address this issue, and Brooklyn District Managers have told me they would have no problem tracking this attendance if it would improve member retention.
Thank you again for giving us time today to talk about the real issues facing our community boards. I take my role as their appointer and convener very seriously, and hope to work with the Council to ensure that they have the resources they need to be as effective as they can be.