City Council Committee on Governmental Operations, State & Federal Legislation Oversight: Community Board Resources and Structure

Good morning, Chair Brewer and thank you for holding this hearing today. I am glad to see the Council giving its attention to community boards’ dire need for resources.

First, I want to explain my opposition to the two bills related to community boards that are being heard today:

Intro 322 would give Councilmembers the power to appoint members to the community boards directly, rather than submitting their recommendations to Borough Presidents’ offices. This bill raises major concerns about both logistics and equity.

Complying with the City Charter’s mandates regarding board member appointments is a huge undertaking. My office has two full-time and one part-time staff who manage this process. It involves creating and disseminating the application, conducting outreach to potential applicants and recruiting them from all parts of the borough, appointing members subject to the mandates laid out in the Charter, tracking and reporting on membership data, and alerting existing members when their terms are expiring and they need to reapply.

In 2018, voters added new language to the City Charter that requires Borough Presidents to seek out applicants of diverse backgrounds, including with regard to race, ethnicity, gender, age, disability status, sexual orientation, and language, as well as other factors which the Borough President may consider important in promoting diversity and inclusion of underrepresented groups and communities. This language also dictates what information the Borough Presidents’ application must collect, and required the BP’s offices to submit a report every year detailing this demographic information and documenting both objectivity and efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in the appointment process.

Last year, my office received almost 1,200 applications for membership on the borough’s 18 boards, and my team personally interviewed every applicant who responded to our interview request. My staff made recommendations based on these interviews, and we shared this information with the appointing Councilmembers. I ultimately appointed members based on staff recommendations, Councilmember recommendations, and ensuring that board membership reflects the demographics of the district and the diversity of our borough as described in the Charter. I appointed almost all the applicants that Councilmembers recommended. The only exception was if the applicant did not qualify based on extra standards I have imposed to promote diversity and objectivity; for example, I will not appoint two members of the same household or staff of elected officials whose district overlaps with the community district.

Given that Intro 322 does not also update language from the 2018 Charter changes, should this bill pass, the application processes that Councilmembers develop could look very different from what my office does and is required to do. There would be no oversight to ensure consistency, so with up to five Councilmembers appointing to a single community board (due to overlapping district lines), one board could have up to six different member applications, which would create confusion and make data tracking nearly impossible. More concerningly, Councilmembers would not be required to consider diversity in their appointments, counter to the mandate that voters gave to ensure diverse representation.

In short, the process is working as-is. Councilmember offices simply do not have the resources to manage this process efficiently. My team and I take our responsibilities seriously, and our demographic report reflects this. With term limits coming into effect starting next year, there will be a significant increase in the number of open seats, requiring a well-coordinated recruitment and appointment process. Now is not the time to shift responsibility to under-resourced staff or to throw out the diversity mandate, especially considering that we already appoint based on Councilmember recommendations the vast majority of the time.

However, one action the Council can take to help this process run more smoothly is to pass Intro 625, which would change the appointment deadline from June to August. This would give Councilmembers more time after the budget passes to focus on candidate recruitment and appointment recommendations.

Intro 501 would create terms of employment for community board district managers. This bill is simply unnecessary. District managers are City employees, hired and managed by the board leadership. They are not elected and therefore should not be subject to terms. All community boards should already have an evaluation and removal process for staff included in their bylaws. If the existing process is an issue, board leadership can consult with the Civic Engagement Commission, which is Charter mandated to provide technical assistance to the boards.

Additionally, the Borough President should not be involved in removing a district manager. I cannot think of another job where someone is involved in firing staff who is not involved in the hiring or supervision of that staff. Once again, this would open the door for duplicative and potentially conflicting regulations, creating confusion and taking away autonomy from the boards.

These two proposals are distracting from what community boards really need to be successful – funding and support. 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.

As term limits approach, the community boards’ staff need more resources than ever to support succession planning, in addition to all the previously identified work. Yet every year, the Council lets community board budgets go untouched during budget negotiations. They are often not even discussed during budget hearings. I urge the Council to give this more attention.

Finally, I urge the Council to support my proposal to the Charter Revision Commission on Government Efficiency to create a Community Board Central Office. Loosely based on the model of City Council’s central staff, This Office would support existing board staff in numerous areas, including land use and planning, communications and technology, real estate matters, human resources, procurement, legal support, and training. This Office 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.

Thank you again for holding this hearing today. I urge the Council not to move either of these bills, and to instead focus on real supports to help our city’s 59 community boards succeed.