“I’ve been on CB4 since 1982 – that’s a lot of borough presidents – and I’ve never seen the quality of board members be any better than they are now," Restuccia says. "The folks coming on are just so much more balanced and more able to participate than they used to be. We don’t have those one-issue people anymore, and our members are so much more diverse now.”
Indeed, from the perspective of community planning, Stringer’s most daunting challenge at this point may not lie with the community boards, but in winning his colleagues in the mayor’s office and City Council over to his way of thinking.
In theory, the city’s public planning process is supposed to give local neighborhoods the chance to voice their opinions about important land-use decisions. In the best of cases, it’s supposed to give them the opportunity to develop their own comprehensive visions for the future of their community, and – some might say – even privilege those plans over competing visions for the simple reason that they come from the people most affected.
Alas, in practice, that’s almost never the way it plays out. Said Eve Baron of MAS: “What’s missing, I think, is a citywide commitment to uphold what’s in the city charter and to uphold the citywide planning framework. There’s a lot that the city could be doing to recognize 197-a plans without turning them into law, which might be a mistake. We have a City Council that reviews each and every land use application that comes along, but we don’t have them reviewing them in light of a 197-a plan like they should be doing. Also, these plans don’t have budgets attached to them, but they could. We’d have a better shot at understanding the capital budget and expense budget implications. That would be one way to give them a more integral role.”
“It’s true that the city has needs that are larger than the community,” added Kent Barwick, “so there needs to be a definite give and take. But if the community plan is ignored to the extent it has been, it’s senseless to create these plans.”
