Common Cause/NY on Best Practices for Community Board Recruitment and Appointment

NEW YORK, NY (03/03/2014)(readMedia)-- Good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Brian Paul and I'm the Research and Policy Manager for Common Cause/New York, a nonpartisan citizens' lobby and a leading force in the battle for open and accountable government. Common Cause fights to strengthen public participation and faith in our institutions of self-government and to ensure that government and political processes serve the general interest, not simply the special interests.

We'd like to thank the Government Operations Committee and Chairperson Kallos for holding this important oversight hearing on best practices and potential reforms to community board recruitment and appointment. As we testified to the City Charter Commission in 2010 and in times past, Common Cause/New York is a staunch supporter of strengthening community boards and making them more open and accessible to all New Yorkers.

New York's community boards originated in the 1950's as "community planning boards." They were institutionalized in the 1963 charter revision with the intent to increase the role for local communities in the planning process. Their creation was in large part a reaction to the overreaches of urban planning "czar" Robert Moses, who from the 1930's to the 1960's oversaw numerous highway, park, and urban renewal construction plans that often ran roughshod over local neighborhoods. In 1968, Mayor John Lindsay led the passage of Local Law 39 which expanded the function of the community boards . The boards acquired their present structure in the charter revision of 1975, which established the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) and expanded the number of boards to the present 59.

The establishment of the community boards represented a triumph for advocates of local democracy and community planning. In the decades since their creation, however, it has become clear that the community boards have not lived up to their intended goals. Barriers to the community boards' mission of empowering local communities and increasing civic participation include lack of adequate resources, an over-politicized appointment process, and a lack of appropriate representational diversity.

With annual budgets of only $200,000 to $300,000 per board, community boards have far fewer staff and resources than other governmental bodies in New York City . The entire budget of all 59 community boards combined amounts to less than 0.02% of the total city budget. Most community boards have no more than two full time staff persons, the District Manager and an administrative assistant, who spend most of their time on administrative tasks and responding to urgent issues. It is abundantly clear that Community Boards have not been provided with the resources needed to adequately fulfill their charter-mandated responsibilities, including their role in the ULURP and annual statement of community district needs. Many community board members and civic governance experts testified to this fact during the 2010 City Charter Commission hearings .

Beyond the critical underlying issue of inadequate resources, the primary barrier to community boards' success as authentic local democratic bodies is the lack of an objective, transparent, and inclusive system of recruitment and appointment.

Community board members are chosen by the Borough Presidents from a pool of applicants. Half of the applicant pool for each community district is nominated by the local City Council Members, but the Borough President has final discretion over the selection of all members. All members serve staggered two-year terms. According to the City's official explanation, qualified board members are selected "from among active, involved people of each community and must reside, work, or have some other significant interest in the community."

This extremely vague description of a board member's qualifications allows the Borough Presidents nearly complete discretion over community board appointments. Each Borough President is free to establish his or her own procedures, and as a result, each of the five boroughs has a different set of rules and procedures for appointing and reappointing members. Briefly reviewing the current application forms of Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens reveals wide ranging discrepancies in the level of detail required on important aspects such as the applicant's race/ethnicity, type of housing, motivation behind seeking board appointment, and potential for conflicts of interest. The current Manhattan application is the most detailed at six pages while the Bronx and Brooklyn are four pages each and Queens' application is only one page with no written questions required at all .

Without a standardized citywide process to recruit and appoint a qualified and diverse body of members, New York's community boards can at times degenerate into mere proxies for more powerful governmental actors and special interests, and fail to adequately represent our neighborhoods.

Recent years have seen at least two examples of Borough Presidents overtly playing politics with community boards by conducting high-profile "purges" of members who dared to vote their conscience. In 2006, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion refused to reappoint the Chair of Bronx Community Board 4 and several other members who voted against the Yankee Stadium redevelopment plan he supported . And in 2007, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz removed five longtime members of Community Board 6 who opposed the Atlantic Yards project. According to one allegedly purged member, Celia Cacace, Markowitz threatened her months in advance of the appointment decision that he was going to "get rid of everyone on the board that voted for this...Remember you are my appointee." Such direct political intimidation and misuse of the powers of appointment to coerce community board members is anathema to the boards' purpose of providing an authentic local community voice in city government.

Without uniform standards, Borough Presidents and City Council Members can also neglect to conduct the outreach and recruitment of new members that is necessary to keep community boards representative of our ever-changing neighborhoods. As communities change over time, very often newer residents are underrepresented as many members, often with connections to long-established civic associations, political clubs, and non-profits, are repeatedly reappointed. The result is that the makeup of many community boards often looks like a time capsule of the neighborhood from 20 or 30 years past. Too often community boards do not reflect the district's ethnic, age, and gender diversity and there is an imbalance in representation between tenants and homeowners, car owners and public transit commuters, and other important diversity factors.

Considering the extremely low funding levels of community boards and lack of specialized staff, it is also important to recruit more members with backgrounds in fields such as urban planning, engineering, accounting, and policy analysis that could help the boards more fully understand and respond to the complex issues often presented to them.

As Manhattan Borough President from 2006-2013, Comptroller Scott Stringer took numerous measures to address these problems in the community boards of his borough . In regards to recruitment and appointment, Stringer's reforms included establishing a more detailed application form, a "Community Board Reform Committee" composed of non-profit civic organizations to review applications on a standard set of criteria, and sending "specialized community liaisons" to conduct outreach to recruit a broader diversity of members.

Stringer's expanded application form, now in use by Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, requires prospective members to answer numerous written questions explaining one's motivation for joining the board and identifying the skills, experience, and relationships one would bring. More importantly it contains an optional section for identifying one's race/ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation and requires the applicant to identify the type of housing one lives in (Public Housing, Mitchell-Lama, Market Rental, Rent-Stabilized, Co-op, Condo, other).

Stringer's application also requires the applicant to identify potential conflicts of interest by posing the question – "Are you employed by or a member of, any entity (e.g. business or non-profit) with proposals, programs, requests, business, applications, licenses, or any other matters which may come before a community board for review, funding, support, or approval during the next two years?" This disclosure is crucial to avoid the potentiality for self-dealing and has also been adopted by Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. in recent years.

Moreover, Stringer's establishment of an independent panel to review applications acts as a check on the potential for the Borough President to coerce, threaten, and "purge" board members strictly for political motives.

Common Cause/New York recommends that the Borough Presidents and City Council build on Stringer's reforms and establish citywide criteria for the recruitment and appointment of community board members. Criteria should seek to encourage diversity of geography, race/ethnicity, age, gender, and skill-sets, as well as appropriate representation of members who live in different types of housing, use different means of transportation, and are affiliated with a variety of community institutions and organizations. The Borough Presidents should establish a uniform application form for all five boroughs that includes the questions needed to encourage such diversity and requires applicants to identify potential conflicts of interest.

Common Cause/NY also recommends that all five Borough Presidents adopt screening panels for applications order to enhance the independence of community boards and minimize the potential for purely political appointments and/or removals.

The City should also consider establishing term-limits for community board members, perhaps five terms of two years each, in order to encourage more individuals to participate and better ensure diverse representation. If term-limits for community board members are not feasible, then the City should at the very least consider establishing uniform term-lengths and limits for the position of Chairperson and the committee chairs so that one individual is not in the position of dominating the community board for decades.

Recruitment could also be much improved by providing the boards with up-to-date technology. Most community boards have websites that only provide basic information such as a calendar of meetings, and most appear to be based on decade-old technology. Some boards lack websites entirely. New York City's community board outreach efforts would greatly benefit from a centralized website providing information for all of the boards in one location, as well as offering tools like interactive forums, maps, and webcasting for all the boards to take advantage of. One example is the "Empower LA" website in Los Angeles that acts as the hub for the city's 95 neighborhood councils.

Establishing a centralized internet hub for community boards would require some outlay of resources, but considering the ready availability of many of these tools through open source software and the willingness of New York's technology community to volunteer for such efforts through "hackathons" or provide them at relatively lower cost than the market, the Borough Presidents and City Council should be able to collaborate to create such a hub at a surprisingly low cost.

New York City's community boards have been overlooked, neglected, and misused by the rest of city government for far too long. Re-invigoration of the community boards, and by extension, of neighborhood civic participation, starts with providing greater resources and establishing a unified, transparent, objective, and inclusive system of recruitment and appointment of board members.