Each and every one of our city’s community boards is currently facing a budget cut of $35,000. Your community board provides a range of services vital to your community’s welfare, from overseeing essential municipal services, to ensuring that you have a voice in local decision-making, to serving as a place-based provider of constituent services. Community boards are the public’s interface with New York City’s enormous and complex government, and they are also government agencies’ conduit to the public. Meaning, for example, that when the Department of Health needs to update a community on the spread of the H1N1 virus, it asks the community board for help with outreach.
Boards already suffer from underfunding, and cuts this deep mean that the public loses out the most: fewer resources will mean tough choices about how to prioritize the many demands made on community boards every day as they struggle to both perform City Charter-mandated responsibilities and attend to the growing needs of constituents.
On Tuesday, June 9, at 11:00 a.m., on the steps of City Hall, join all five of New York’s borough presidents, all 59 of New York’s community boards, and community advocates of all stripes, in calling on the City Council for the restoration of community board budgets for the coming fiscal year. (This rally has been organized by the Manhattan Borough President’s Office.)
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June 7, 2009 at 11:30 pm
Corey Bearak
CIVIC 2030 (http://queensciviccongress.org/platform/CIVIC2030.pdf), our platform, not only recognizes the important role of our community boards, but recommends the city adequately resource these local boards of citizen-volunteers each staffed by small team of caring pros who know how the city works. City Hall again cut the budgets for the board. I would certainly sacrifice a Deputy Mayor or two before I would let such dumb cuts get done.
My personal experience (http://coreybearak.com/) with community planning now approaching three decades including two of them in city government with the City Council and a borough president (including oversight of the agency’s planning functions) found more problems with the process BEFORE projects and proposals came to the community board.
Also posted at http://www.queensciviccongress.or9: 2009-04-30 FY2010 Community Board Budget Cuts opposed by Queens Community Boards
Letter to the Mayor from the 14 Queens Community Board chairs (http://queensciviccongress.org/Media/files/2009/2009-04-30_Joint_CB_Chairs.pdf)