Community Board Meetings are too damn long

A 2018 reimagining of Norman Rockwell’s painting “Freedom of Speech” by artists Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur

New York City Community Board meetings are too damn long. I attended the Manhattan Community Board 9 (CB9) meeting on February 16th. It started at 6:30pm with a scheduled conclusion at 9pm. Two-and-half hours is already too long, but at 9pm the chair of CB9 said there was still another hour-and-half of agenda items left. That blew my mind. This system needs an overhaul on timing if it wants to attract more representative and fulfilling participation from creative and hard-working New Yorkers.

To be clear, there were a lot of positive aspects to the meeting. For example, the legalization of cannabis is a major public policy shift going on in New York City right now. The meeting had a variety of viewpoints from community board members, speakers, and the public to discuss the topic. The presentation from a public health organization about reducing smoking in New York City was informative, and community board members responded by sharing other local organizations the speaker should connect with. The meeting also had local entrepreneurs who were opening a cannabis shop, appearing in-person to talk about partnering on a cannabis education event for 4/20.

Furthermore, the integration of Zoom into the meeting was a significant win for accessibility, with around 50 people joining virtually. I am sure parents and other people with busy schedules appreciate having this option for participating in community board meetings.

So, why are long meetings such a problem? I believe that many thoughtful and creative New York City residents, who are currently not involved, would be more open to applying and staying on Community Boards if the meetings were shorter. Additionally, I suspect that community board members would enjoy their commitment more and retain more information from the meetings if they were shorter. We could use surveys and interviews to back up these claims with data.

How can we make the meetings shorter? One obvious solution would be to conduct more of the meeting offline. But, that might not be in line with the public transparency that Community Boards are supposed to optimize for. Other ideas might be better. One solution for Community Board 9 in particular could be to have one hour meetings every week instead of these monster three-to-four hour meetings every month. Many social obligations, such as church, already revolve around a weekly schedule, so this would adhere to that expectation people already have.

That said, I really think there are two key levers that we need to focus on.

First, we need to fund deeper parliamentary procedure training for all New York City community board members and visitors. Borough Presidents should write legislation to create a certification course on parliamentary procedure, or individual Borough Presidents could create their own certification and use City Council member discretionary funds to implement this idea. This is crucial because currently, people don't always adhere to the rules. Speakers speak over their limit and community board members speak out of turn. In fact, in the meeting I attended, a City Council member representative gave an update, left in the middle of their allocated time, and then reappeared an hour later to continue giving updates. It's hard to stick to the schedule if people are making up the rules as they go along.

Second, the Chair of the Community Board should be incentivized to keep meetings in order. I might discuss specific ideas on these incentives in a future post. For example, publishing the length of Community Board meetings could assist with accountability. Regardless of how we get there, Community Board chairs need to be empowered to enforce parliamentary procedure rules. If they feel uncomfortable enforcing the rules, then we will never have reasonably timed meetings.

In conclusion, I want to reiterate that a lot of good information sharing happens in community board meetings. I am not advocating that we do away or fundamentally restructure community boards. Instead, we have an opportunity to strengthen and broaden participation in them. Right now, Community Board meetings are too damn long. But with some changes, we could have a more representative and fulfilled set of citizens giving feedback on city issues and initiatives.