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New York City Electeds, Advocates Outline Priorities for State Climate Action Council


Mayor Adams and others discuss wind energy plans (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


New York’s sweeping Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019 set the state on a path to reaching net-zero emissions over the next three decades. The law established a Climate Action Council that drafted a framework for achieving that goal, and is now more than halfway through the process of seeking public input on its proposed plan. 

The Council held its seventh public hearing on Tuesday in Brooklyn, out of eleven total scheduled, where elected officials, advocates, and other stakeholders testified about its initial draft scoping plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions, transition to renewable energy sources, electrify transit, and take other measures.

The CLCPA requires the state to cut economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030 and by 85% by 2050, compared to 1990 levels, all while creating hundreds of thousands of green jobs and investing in historically disadvantaged communities that have borne the brunt of environmental injustice and are at highest risk from the adverse effects of pollution and climate change. Under the law, those communities are meant to receive 35% of funding for green energy and environmental improvement projects.

The Climate Action Council’s final plan to achieve all those overall goals is due by January 2023. The Council is a 22-member committee co-chaired by Doreen Harris, president and CEO of New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), and Basil Seggos, commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation. Members on the committee include heads of state agencies, environmental advocates, and experts. Once the Council approves its final plan, it will be submitted to the governor and the state Legislature, and will inform major state policy, legislative, and budgetary decisions.

More than 200 people had signed up to speak at Tuesday’s hearing. Among them were officials like New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, and representatives for City Comptroller Brad Lander, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, and Mayor Eric Adams. Advocates were there in force from groups including UPROSE, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, Sierra Club, El Puente, NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, Brownsville Green Justice, Make the Road, New York Communities for Change, and NY Renews.

Rohit Aggarwala, New York City’s chief climate officer and commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, stressed that any final plan adopted by the CAC “must embrace the interdependency” between the city’s and state’s respective climate agendas. As he noted, the city accounts for 43% of the state’s population, 50% of its economy, more than 50% of its taxes, 59% of its disadvantaged communities, and about 25% of its greenhouse gas emissions.

“In short, New York City cannot achieve its climate goals unless New York State achieves its climate goals. And New York State cannot achieve its climate goals unless New York City achieves its goals,” said Aggarwala, an appointee of Mayor Adams.  

Aggarwala cautioned against the state taking actions similar to the past where the city has been punished either through funding formulas that advantage smaller communities, or funding that punishes the city for imposing mandates or ignoring building types and ownership structures prevalent in the city. 

He suggested several ways the state could aid the city, including state funding to implement Local Law 97, which places emissions limits on the city’s biggest buildings, helping turn power plants into green energy hubs, and prioritizing electrification of vehicles in the areas with the most ambient air pollution. “The city and state will succeed together. We have no choice but to work together,” he said. 

Kizzy Charles-Guzman, executive director of the Mayor's Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, reiterated the need for state support to help decarbonize the city’s buildings. Though Local Law 97 targets the biggest polluters in the city, Charles-Guzman said, “We want to partner with the state to ensure that all buildings including one- to four-family homes have financial support and assistance to decarbonize, achieve energy efficiency, improve air quality, and improve resiliency.” 

Charles-Guzman also urged the Climate Action Council to ensure geographic equity in distributing green investments to disadvantaged communities and to focus on mitigating cost increases for customers in the transition towards green energy. 

Louise Yeung, the first chief climate officer at the New York City Comptroller’s office, testified to the broader consequences of climate change. “Our office takes a long-term view in managing risks facing the city, including the climate risks that threaten our financial, physical, and social future,” she said. Yeung called for a moratorium on new fossil fuel infrastructure, retiring the Ravenswood and Astoria gas power plants and turning them to clean energy hubs, major investments in renewable energy, incentivizing electric vehicle adoption, reducing waste export, and prioritizing electrification and decarbonisation for low-income and environmental justice communities while maintaining energy affordability.

“These mitigation strategies are estimated to save $90 to $120 billion compared to the cost of inaction and create 198,000 jobs,” she said. “We cannot squander this moment.” 

In submitted testimony to the Climate Action Council, Brooklyn Borough President Reynoso addressed the impact that the final plan will have on Brooklyn’s infrastructure, transportation, buildings, waste, and land use.

“Brooklyn is well-positioned to lead the city in building the green economy,” he said, pointing, for example, to the offshore wind hub planned for the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in Sunset Park and community efforts to oppose National Grid’s North Brooklyn Pipeline. 

He did raise concerns that the draft scoping plan puts far too much emphasis on electrifying single-occupancy vehicles, instead of encouraging people to use public transit instead. “The most important thing that New York State can do to make New York City more sustainable is to fix the MTA,” he said, stressing the need to implement congestion pricing and to find sustainable revenue streams to make subways and buses “clean, efficient, reliable, accessible, and affordable.”  

He also called for state investments to help the city implement universal curbside organics collection, expand recycling programs, and limit single-use plastics, among other measures.

Queens Borough President Richards was not present to testify but said in a statement to Gotham Gazette, “From Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Ida to Asthma Alley in Astoria, Queens is far too familiar with the devastating impacts climate change and extreme weather can unleash. It has never been more critical to do all we can as a city and state to stem the tide of the climate crisis. I stand with our frontline communities and all our clean energy partners to call on our state to put forth the efficient roadmap possible in our push to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels and invest in energy equity.” 

Katherine Brezler, strategic advisor to Richards who testified on his behalf, also emphasized the need to focus on disadvantaged communities, particularly in Queens where higher pollution has been linked to worse health outcomes. “In Queens, this means our neighbors’ lives could be spared because we chose to slow the catastrophic impacts of climate change,” she said. 

But she also stressed the importance of investing in flood mitigation strategies, pointing to the devastating impact that Hurricane Ida had on the borough last year as inland neighborhoods flooded and several people died in their homes.

Public Advocate Williams, in his testimony, echoed those who came before him. “We must begin the difficult, and hopefully shared pain, work of transitioning away from fossil fuels today,” he said.  

“The CLCPA can be a monumental step forward in our city but first must be fully funded and enforced. Communities cannot be left to fend for themselves amid the most dire consequences of climate change,” he added. 

Williams specifically pushed for the state to pass the All-Electric Buildings Act, which would ban new gas and oil hookups in building construction across the state starting in 2024 — similar to the law passed in New York City. Governor Hochul proposed a version of the bill in her executive budget, which would have gone into effect in 2027, which was the core of disagreement with the Legislature. 

Echoing Williams’ demands, some advocates have called for the state to put an initial $15 billion into renewable energy infrastructure, and have pushed for raising at least $10 billion with higher taxes on the wealthy to fund housing, mass transit, and green energy projects. Some state funding could also come from the $4.2 billion Clean Water, Clean Air, Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act, which is headed to a ballot referendum in November.  

Advocates are also pushing for a slew of state legislation, some of which came up in testimony Tuesday, including the Climate and Community Investment Act, a moratorium on cryptocurrency mining, the Clean Futures Act, the Cumulative Impacts Act, the Fossil Fuel Subsidy Elimination Act, the New York Build Public Renewables Act, the Renewable Capitol Act, and the Teachers’ Fossil Fuel Divestment Act. 

[Read: During Earth Week, Advocates Press New York State and City Leaders to Go Bolder on Climate Policy]

At the hearing, Williams also repeatedly stressed that the plan must create a “just transition” to a green economy and he pointed to concerns raised by labor unions about that energy transition.

Utility workers, employed by National Grid in Brooklyn and Queens, affiliated with the Transport Workers Union Local 101 rallied on Tuesday outside the site of the public hearing, expressing worries that the climate plan will lead to thousands of them losing their jobs while significantly raising costs for homeowners and residents. 

“This draft plan would be a job killing disaster and also will zap residents and homeowners with sky-high energy costs,” said TWU Local 101 President Constance Bradley, in a statement. “It would wipe out thousands of good union jobs that enable blue-collar families to put food on the table, pay the rent, and send their kids to college. There is a better way.” 

TWU has instead supported a fossil-free energy plan created by National Grid that would replace the use of natural gas with Renewable Natural Gas from landfills, farms, waste-water facilities, and green hydrogen, produced by solar and wind farms, according to a TWU Local 11 press release. According to the plan, National Grid aims to be fossil-free by 2050. 

“It’s now or never time for New York Democrats,” said TWU International President John Samuelsen, in a statement. “Are you going to be the party protecting the economic security of workers as we transition to a greener world, or are you the party of environmental elites?” 

At least one advocate said those arguments by organized labor were distracting from real solutions. “We cannot allow the corporations to continue to inculcate or bamboozle our family in labor with false solutions like green hydrogen, blue hydrogen, carbon capture sequestration. Those are not the jobs of the future,” said Anthony Rogers-Wright, director of environmental justice for New York Lawyers for the Public Interest and a steering committee member of NY Renews. He said the Climate Action Council should instead recommend passage of the Climate and Community Investment Act, which would create a new state authority to invest in major green energy projects, housing retrofits, and green vehicles, and would specifically protect workers currently in the fossil fuel industry. “There will never be climate justice without justice for our workers. We don’t leave workers behind,” he said. 

Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UPROSE, said that investments in disadvantaged communities should be at least 40% of spending under the new climate plan.

“The CLCPA must serve as a model across public and private sectors and prioritize moving a minimum of 40% direct investments to frontline communities- those most impacted, but least responsible for climate change,” Yeampierre said. “40% investments is the baseline and not the ceiling in order to protect communities and build equitable systems that allow communities to survive and thrive in the face of disasters.”

Many advocates have been critical of the pace of progress that New York has made in tackling the increasing urgency of the climate crisis. As Alice Hu, a climate campaigner for New York Communities for Change, pointed out in her testimony, the state’s emissions have likely increased in recent years with the shutdown of the Indian Point nuclear power plant with insufficient renewable energy to replace it, and as more people take to cars as mass transit systems are seeing underinvestment.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Experts Analyze Future of New York City's Central Business Districts


At the stock exchange (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on New York City’s core Central Business Districts – particularly Midtown Manhattan and Lower Manhattan – which are home to the businesses and industries that are the biggest drivers of the city’s economy.

The lockdown and stay-at-home orders forced by the pandemic changed the nature of work in the city and beyond, and though the office sector – including the information, financial and real estate, and professional and business services industries that occupy so much of the space – fared better than some other sectors of the economy, it has nonetheless seen seemingly irreversible changes. Office employment in the city fell 5.7% in 2020, compared to an 11.1% drop in total employment, and while the sector has recovered some of those jobs, it lags behind the state and the rest of the country. Overall, the total office sector accounts for a third of all private jobs in the city and contributes two-thirds of its economic output.

But the real shift has been businesses adopting fully-remote and hybrid work models, with the rate of in-office workers still at 37.1% of pre-pandemic levels, according to State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s office. With white-collar workers staying home, companies gave up their leases and shrank office space, leading to increasing office vacancy rates which remained at 21% in the second quarter of 2022, levels that the city hasn’t seen in three decades, per the Comptroller’s office. The market value of office buildings fell by $28.6 billion citywide in the fiscal year 2022 final assessment roll, the first drop since fiscal year 2000, leading to a significant decrease in property taxes for the city, an essential source of revenue used to pay for government services. And as Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat just four months into his term, has repeatedly stressed, the greatly reduced rates of in-office work have impacted other parts of the city’s economy, particularly the many service and hospitality jobs that relied on those missing commuters.

These trends have thrown up important questions about the future of the Central Business District, and experts sought to address them on Monday afternoon in a panel discussion hosted by the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit urban think tank. The panelists included Yael Taqqu, managing partner of the New York office of McKinsey & Company; MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber; Deputy Mayor for Economic and Workforce Development Maria Torres-Springer; and Vishaan Chakrabarti, founder and creative director of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism. Scott Rechler, RPA chair and CEO of RXR Realty, moderated.

“[T]he healthiest CBDs are dynamic, they evolve, they have to innovate for relevance,” said Taqqu. Pointing to recent research from Stanford University, Taqqu said flexible work conditions are certain to continue as employees ask for more flexibility and large employers are increasingly acceding those demands.

The effects of that flexibility are broad, from changes in commuting patterns, shifts in real estate values, and shifts in service sector jobs to where there is demand for them. “I think it's much more helpful to think about the implications of all of this as a redistribution rather than necessarily a net loss of economic activity or net loss of consumption of public services,” said Taqqu.

She said there are three principles that the CBDs will have to follow for success: being adaptive in the use of real estate, improving the city’s social fabric and inclusion, and partnering across public, private, and social sectors.

“I believe this is going to be a continual work in progress because I don't think any of us really know exactly how the futures of the CBD ecosystem, the future of work, how this all is going to play itself out over time,” said Rechler.

Though Mayor Adams has repeatedly urged companies to bring their employees back to work for the last several months, even he has recently admitted that there is likely a lower ceiling at play than he would prefer. “We know post-covid we’re going to be dealing with a different universe, may go to a four-day workweek for some,” Adams told the New York Post editorial board in an interview.

“It is a real concern,” he said. “We’re going to have to get to the table with all of our business leaders, our economists — and really, we can’t stumble into post-covid.” Adams has held regular meetings with a business council he assembled as well as with specific industry and sector leaders, including an appearance at a private Goldman Sachs employee town hall. 

Some elected officials have embraced the trend towards flexible work. City Comptroller Brad Lander, for instance, has said that the city should take this opportunity to find new uses for vacant real estate. “Flexible scheduling is the future of office-based work, and New York needs to embrace it to thrive,” he tweeted in March. “Let’s see some creative uses for Midtown offices—think biotech labs, innovation incubators, a @CUNY campus, and more Midtown karaoke!”

A clear challenge presented by flexible work is the decrease in commuting, which has robbed the city’s mass transit system of massive amounts of expected revenue. “New York's density means that mass transit is the only option wherever people are traveling,” said Lieber, insisting that the future of CBDs will rely on investments in mass transit. “Our density is twice Chicago’s and Boston's and eight or nine times Sunbelt cities like Phoenix or Houston, so we don't really have the option of moving to Ubers or to e-private cars or something else. So it has to be a mass transit solution of some kind.”

But he also acknowledged, “The shift in the patterns of travel does give us a chance to rethink service a little bit.” While he said the MTA is already focused on adding more train and subway capacity through major infrastructure projects like East Side Access, and could focus on greater service for reverse peak commuters and in areas where workers have shifted, the most important adaptation will be a stronger bus system.

“Buses are the way to do adjustments to mass transit service quickly, but it means that we have to figure out how to run bus service faster than walking,” said Lieber. He also said that projects such as Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposed Interborough Express will be crucial, since jobs are increasingly growing in the boroughs outside Manhattan.

For elected officials, Lieber had a key piece of advice. “I think the single biggest adjustment is the one that our elected leaders are going to have to make, which is to recognize that transit, as proven during covid, is an essential service that needs to be funded in the same spirit as as police, fire, and sanitation,” he said.

The fate of the city’s five CBDs – which includes Downtown Brooklyn, Downtown Flushing, and Long Island City, besides Manhattan – isn’t all doom and gloom and Torres-Springer was optimistic that the city’s economy is turning the corner. “Nevertheless, there are some real trends that we have to pay attention to. We can't stick our heads in the sand,” she said.

Torres-Springer warned against “the urge to overcorrect” in reexamining real estate uses in CBDs. “It's one thing, of course, to loosen up how we think about the uses in Midtown and other four districts. But I think it's probably premature to think that we have full clarity about what the future holds,” she said.

Comptroller DiNapoli issued a similar warning in a report on the city’s office sector in October. “Given deep uncertainty over the fate of the office sector, policy makers should be careful not to assume too much about the potential state of the office market at this point in time when informing long-term policy regarding the industry,” the report reads. “The City should also continue to take steps to enhance safety, enliven public spaces and reduce friction in commutation to help workers feel comfortable in returning to the Central Business District.”

Besides encouraging the long-term economic vitality of business districts – as the city did with the large-scale rezoning of East Midtown – Torres-Springer said the city has to support the adaptive reuse of obsolete buildings, cutting red tape that comes with those adaptations and, chiefly, focus on equity. “We also have to be squarely focused on equity and very deliberate about how business districts evolve because we all know that left to their own devices, there's a very big risk that they will be reimagined, remade in ways that just entrench existing disparities and inequities,” she said, speaking of the need to build commensurate affordable housing and promoting employment for minority- and women-owned Businesses (MWBEs) and low-wage service workers.

Chakrabarti said “CBD” needs to evolve, “whether you want to call it collaborative business district or creative business district, or connective business district,” as workers have spread out across the city and aren’t only concentrated in Manhattan. However, he did say that the city should provide tax incentives to encourage the conversion and reuse of older buildings in Midtown into residential developments. “I think we need to focus on the kind of buildings that were having trouble even before the pandemic, the stuff from the ‘60s and the ‘70s, low ceiling heights, you know, lots of columns.”

At the same time, Chakrabarti said the city has an opportunity to think about changing how it uses its streets and creates open space to improve quality of life. “A third of New York City is road bed and I think we need to think much more creatively about how we use that road bed rather than giving it over to private vehicles,” he said.

“I just think there's so many opportunities to create new public space all around the city, in all five boroughs, just because we've just left all this space to cars and parking and things that just are not part of the future of the city,” he later added.

As Rechler noted, the recovery of the city’s business districts stands to be hurt by the immense lack of affordable housing, with job growth outpacing the creation of housing in the city. Torres-Springer said that housing security has only been exacerbated by the pandemic and the city and state need a more regional approach to the problem, focused on downtown areas. “It's not rocket science. We don't have to reinvent the wheel,” she said. “We know that that means strengthening fair housing laws. It means enabling more [housing] production. Overall, it certainly of course also means building more affordable housing. It means a commitment to public housing in ways that just have not happened previously. And on the economic development side, it means expanding access to well-paying jobs.”

Taqqu pointed to the conversation moving away from central districts to 15-minute neighborhoods, an issue that at least one major Democratic candidate, Shaun Donovan, talked about in last year’s mayoral race. “If we do move toward that model and be thinking centrality and thinking about 15-minute hubs, we have to make sure that this doesn't entrench inequality and concentration of wealth even further,” Taqqu said.

Asked about the mayor’s laser focus on public safety, which he views as the prerequisite to the city’s recovery, Torres-Springer said the solutions aren’t limited to the CBD. “The mayor has been very clear that we have to resist the temptation to make false choices. And so justice and public safety, we can get both,” she said. “And I think the same is true when we think about the major public policy challenges…It is not a choice between our central business district and the outer boroughs, or a choice between office workers, white collar workers and service workers. If there's a way, if we do this right, to be able to uplift all of these communities.”

“The opportunity in front of us is to solve a lot of problems, multiple problems at the same time including bringing together all that we can, investing in the civic infrastructure, healthcare, community space, entertainment, education,” Torres-Springer added.

***
by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Civic Engagement Commission to Launch Citywide Participatory Budgeting After Pandemic Delay


Dr. Sarah Sayeed (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


The first citywide participatory budgeting program is expected to launch later this year after a two-year delay largely due to the COVID-19 state of emergency, officials said at a City Council hearing last week.

The program was approved by voters in 2018 as one of three City Charter-mandated functions of the new Civic Engagement Commission (CEC) created in the same ballot referendum. The two-year participatory budgeting process, intended to give New Yorkers a more direct say in how some tax dollars are spent, will begin in "late summer," according to CEC Chair and Executive Director Dr. Sarah Sayeed.

"We are actively engaging multiple stakeholders through June 2022 to gather feedback on various aspects of the program…particularly around the use of civic tech, evaluation, and outreach and engagement strategies to ensure an inclusive process," Sayeed told members of the City Council's Committee on Governmental Operations on Friday. It was the first time the CEC has been the subject of an oversight hearing in the rocky three years since it was created through a charter revision commission assembled by former Mayor Bill de Blasio and approved by voters.

The Civic Engagement Commission has three specific responsibilities under the Charter: implementing citywide participatory budgeting; providing urban planning expertise to community boards; and assisting in language interpretation at poll sites. In 2021, then Mayor Bill de Blasio signed an executive order to bring DemocracyNYC, another city office dedicated to boosting voter turnout and civic engagement, under the purview of the commission.

De Blasio is also largely responsible for creating the CEC in the first place, having initiated the Charter revision process that established it. The body consists of 15 members: the chair and seven others appointed by the mayor, two by the City Council, and one by each of the five borough presidents.

The CEC's overall budget in the current fiscal year (2022) is $4.87 million, according to Sayeed. The commission currently has nine full-time staff positions, but is hiring an additional 10 as part of the participatory budgeting rollout.

The Charter required citywide participatory budgeting to begin in July 2020. But the onset of the pandemic upended city life and governmental processes. De Blasio allocated no new funding to the program, leaving the CEC to use its operating budget for a series of local participatory budgeting pilots.

"While I applaud the CEC's effort to make do with the resources it had available these smaller scale programs were a far cry from the citywide program that New Yorkers were promised when they voted to establish the CEC in 2018," said Council Member Sandra Ung, a Queens Democrat and chair of the governmental operations committee, at Friday’s hearing.

In late April, Mayor Eric Adams released a $99.7 billion executive budget proposal for fiscal year 2023, which begins July 1. The spending plan includes a $5 million citywide participatory budgeting program to be voted on in fiscal year 2023 and implemented in fiscal year 2024, according to Sayeed.

The CEC is currently developing a plan to implement the citywide project in consultation with an advisory committee and other government offices. The program is modeled on the City Council's participatory budgeting system that allows communities to propose and vote on capital projects in their districts, like improvements to parks and public spaces.

The Council program has been voluntary for Council members to choose to operate in their districts. The citywide version will be using expense budget dollars that Sayeed said will fund shorter-term projects that will show results more quickly than capital infrastructure projects. The Commission intends to vote on the details of the implementation plan by the end of July.

The program will take two years. The first year, through June 2023, will be dedicated to developing the projects members of the public will be voting on. Implementing the winning projects will take place from July 2023 through June 2024 (city fiscal year 2024). City Council members will still be able to use their discretionary funding to run separate participatory budgeting programs in their districts.

Lawmakers at the hearing Friday raised concerns about the platform CEC has been using to pilot participatory budgeting. The CEC is currently using an open-source online platform called Decidim that allows users to pitch, discuss, and vote on proposals and policy. Over the last two years, the CEC used the platform for a $100,000 participatory budgeting program for youth and a $1.3 million program in the 33 predominantly Black, Latino, and immigrant neighborhoods identified by a city task force as hardest hit by the pandemic. It was also used by the 13 City Council members who opted to bring participatory budgeting to their districts this year (a number far lower than pre-pandemic participation rates).

"I think this cycle garnered probably the lowest voter turnout, not because people weren't excited about deciding how to spend the city's dollars on projects that are dear to them but because of how inaccessible the website was," said Council Member Shahana Hanif, a Brooklyn Democrat.

"I'd love to figure out how to make this work because if we keep Decidim we're going to fail PB in the city," Hanif told Sayeed.

Sayeed defended choosing Decidim but acknowledged the process was a work in progress. "We researched a variety of different platforms and found this one seemed to be the best one and also allows us to stay connected with other municipalities who are doing this work," she said. The commission is doing user-experience testing and is open to "tweaking" the platform. 

"As a new agency we're building the plane as we fly it and we're continuing to learn along the way," said Sayeed.

Poll-Site Interpretation Services
The CEC also provides translation services at poll sites in languages not covered by the city's Board of Elections, which offers interpretation in six languages mandated under the federal Voting Rights Act.

In recent elections, CEC translators have covered 25 poll sites during the last weekend of early voting and 75 sites on election day. While the Charter requires the CEC to set a methodology for deploying services, that formula is contingent on how much funding the mayor and City Council provide.

"The total number of poll sites depends on the amount of money allocated to this program, availability of qualified interpreters for the Program languages, and the time needed to recruit interpreters," Sayeed told the Council.

The CEC has a $1.8 million allocation for interpretation services in the current fiscal year. Languages include Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, French, Haitian Creole, Italian, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Russian, Urdu, and Yiddish. The body served only 2,784 voters across three elections in 2020 and 2021 (one primary and two general elections).

Community Board Assistance
The Charter charges the CEC with supporting community boards in land use decisions by identifying and providing independent technical experts in urban planning. The amendment was introduced as a measure to give community boards more independence from the borough presidents who appoint their members and can exert influence through the land use experts they refer. It was also designed as a measure to help community boards retain expertise as term limits kick in.

The CEC is also responsible for offering language access services and other training; all 59 community boards now have telephonic translators provided by the CEC, according to Sayeed.

Following a "Request for Expressions of Interest," the CEC compiled a list of 13 urban planning consultants, including minority- and women-run firms (MWBEs), for community boards to use.

City Council Member Gale Brewer, a Democrat and the former Manhattan Borough President, said the CEC's mandate to provide consultants was "duplicative" of existing borough presidents' and nonprofit efforts and worried about the potential for influence from City Hall.

"We did the MWBE directory, that's the only thing we've done to date," said Sayeed, defending the CEC's role. "Anything we do in the future will be coordinated and non-duplicative."

"I didn't want you involved with the community boards, I'll be honest, because I think it's a conflict," Brewer said, referring to the mayor's ability to hire and fire CEC leadership. "I think they should be independent, not subject to anything that the mayor does."

"You have a big staff so I'm trying to think of what more you can do," added Brewer, who chairs the Council’s investigations and oversight committee.

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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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