Rally to Oppose Community Board Budget Cuts

According to the City Charter, the community boards play an advisory role in zoning and other land-use issues, in community planning, in the city budget process, and in the coordination of municipal services. Most boards typically hire a full time district manager and other staff to run a district office that receives and works to resolve residents' service delivery problems.

As others have said, some function better than others both in terms of dealing with municipal service delivery issues on behalf of the residents and businesses in the area and in terms of their ability to actually act as the voice of the community rather than politically appointed puppets. The effectiveness of the board to act as a voice for the community is very much dependent on the involvement of the community - each board has 50 appointed volunteer members and all meetings are open to the public.

While all boards prepare a statement of district needs (rehab this park, put a computer lab in this school, etc) during budget time each year, my experience has been that these are not as effective in getting things done in the district as are separate community groups advocating for a specific budget request (for example,a PTA organizing to advocate for a computer lab).

However, typically, for any discretionary land use item (all those that come up for a vote in the City Council and the City Planning Commission or even sometimes the Board of Standards and Appeals but the BSA is too much to get into here)for any discretionary land use item, both the local Council Member and the Council Zoning and Land Use Committee Members as well as the City Planning Commission almost always look to the community board position to determine what action to take.

That said, I think that community boards are extremely important as the structure intended to bring a voice to the community on issue that effect our everyday lives. I think rather than doing away with them and completely denying a voice for the people (which I personally think seems to be Bloomberg's m.o. in general), we should be making them more effective and respected.

The staff that is hired to deal with constituent complaints about delivery of municipal services are probably not necessary at this point - those same types of staff people exist in the council member offices, the mayor's office, and through 311.

I think we'd be better served if those staff were instead people with some expertise relevant to the other community-wide roles of the community boards - land use and budget - rather than individual constituent services.

For example, community board 4 in Manhattan was able to lead the successful fight against the West Side stadium. They have local community board members with the time, funds, and expertise to mount that sort of a fight. For example an urban planner that took this on *instead* of her regular full time job. However, community board 4 in the Bronx, did not have any community board member with zoning expertise able to quit their job and put their life on hold to do this. Nor should they have to! And, of course the result there was quite different.

Regardless of where you stand on either of those stadium issues or on Atlantic Yards, my point here is that community boards are an important part of democracy, a part we should be strengthening and making more effective.

Sorry for the long post, with Bloomberg trying to buy a third term and Golisano have just bought a coup in Albany, I am feeling a little bit voiceless today. It makes me very sad/angry that the voice of us regular people seems to matter less and less in New York's supposed democracy.

Posted by: aysataba at June 10, 2009 10:48 AM