Frustrations Inside and Out Community Board #1
By Joseph Wendelken
By the time that the Public Safety subcommittee’s chairman has made his way to the head of a narrow conference room, almost 15 people have found seats beneath the neighborhood maps fixed up at its two long walls. He quickly reviews an attendance sheet and the collected paperwork awaiting him on a small table before the American flag tucked into a back corner.
Abounding tales of the mounting discontent with the Community Board have one half expecting the room to explode into a gavel-pounding frenzy at any chance moment. Instead, like a playful civics teacher directing his class of unassuming students, he has each party of restaurateurs and business owners rise and briefly explain the circumstances surrounding their permit requests. Twenty minutes later, after hearing the lone remaining attendee’s quick clarification of his frustration with a local club’s noise level, the confusingly uneventful meeting has been adjourned and the understanding of exactly what CB #1 is must again be revisited.
CB #1 Task Force Members
Community Board #1, serving Williamsburg and Greenpoint, is one of Brooklyn’s 18 community boards and one of 59 in the City. CB #1, like all of the City’s community boards, is composed of a group of volunteers numbering no more than 50 that live, work, or have other vested interests in the geographically defined neighborhood. The community’s City Council Members - Diana Reyna and David S. Yassky; a city-employed district manager - Gerald A. Esposito; and the borough president - Marty Markowitz, assume seats as well.
Envisioned as old-style town hall gatherings, the City’s boards were created to serve as meetings places where interested and concerned citizens could discuss district issues and track government performance. The Boards function as the medium through which community members can advise local and city agencies on neighborhood matters.
CB #1 addresses these matters in 24 different subcommittees, which, in addition to Public Safety, include Education, Transportation, and Disability Concerns. These committees hold regular meetings that, depending on the topic’s divisiveness, are often better attended than the larger Board gatherings. The individual subcommittees sit beneath an Executive Committee, elected annually from the 50-member group.
The Board invites community members to attend monthly meetings, participate in its public hearings and sessions, attend subcommittee meetings, and communicate neighborhood concerns with its District Manager. Community members are also encouraged to seek seats on the Board through filing an application with the office of either one of the local City Council Member or the Borough President.
While many Greenpoint and Williamsburg residents actively contribute to CB #1 and are very much a part of their local process, they have encountered difficulty taking the Board up on its invitation to gain an appointment. These community members not only have a very real presence at current Board meetings and a thorough understanding of its undertakings, but also are active in their respective communities. Councilman Yassky’s office’s listing of these as major criteria for a Board nomination make their exclusion that much more inexplicable.
Long-time Board member Irene Klementowicz, speaking to what she calls a “closedness that has always been a part of the Board,” recalls the three separate applications she submitted before finally making it through the process and gaining an appointment. She describes her application complications as hurdles purposefully put in her path because she was, and remains, like several other qualified and committed individuals still without appointments, a vocal personality willing to stand by her opinion and contest CB #1’s time-honored establishment.
A spokesman from Councilwoman Reyna’s office, describing the process by which new members are appointed, says that in the instance of a Board vacancy her office “reaches out to different community organizations before inviting interested parties to submit their resumes and formally interview with the Councilwoman.” However, the characterizations of the application, nomination, and appointment process by different Board members is inconsistent - some describing their fast-forward moves to vacant seats after merely walking to a Council Member’s office and filling out an application while others, such as Klementowicz, gripe about a maddeningly drawn out, inefficient process that persists in spite of the board’s current need for community members to chair and man committees.
Rally for Community Rezoning Plan at City Hall
While opinion on the fluidity of the appointment process differs, sentiment around the Board is near unanimous that the Borough President and its two City Council Members are, as a current Board member described, “just names on the letterhead,” speculating that, “a fear of alienating constituents has them all taking a hands-off role.”
While the Board carries little formal political weight and essentially serves in an advisory role for its lawmakers and elected officials, many believe that the two local Council Members are less than enthusiastic about having the Board put forth recommendations that will inevitably pass through their respective offices, suggesting that they further tax already thin budgets, schedules, and resources. Consequently, it is simply politically expedient for the Council Members to push through nominees that are, from the prevailing thought around the Board, less likely to ‘stir the stew.’ Reyna’s spokesman could not recall an instance in which a community member was blocked from receiving a seat on the board, but Reyna does, as he described it, “prioritize candidates based on whether they share the Councilwoman’s views on the important local issues.”
Meeting with CB #1 Members, NYCEDC, Architects and Public to discuss proposed park in Greenpoint.
While the Council Members certainly are discriminating in their selections, long-time District Manager Gerald Esposito and long-time Executive Committee Chairman Vincent V. Abate, both more familiar with the Board’s personalities than the elected officials are, were unavailable to comment on the contributions they make, if any, to the process.
Not only is the district that CB #1 represents one of the City’s largest (Williamsburg, East Williamsburg, Northside, Southside, and Greenpoint), it is also one of the City’s most dynamic. In such burgeoning areas the greatest challenge before community boards is to incorporate and channel the energy of its newest residents while holding to its local character and ensuring that its tradition is not washed down river with the wave of ‘new blood.’ However, many close to the Board believe that CB #1’s scales have tipped in the direction of continuity and status quo maintenance, citing Esposito’s and Abate’s tenures, both now decades long, as a source of the board’s inaccessibility.
Mieszko Kalita, chairman of the Parks and Recreation subcommittee and three-year Board member, while acknowledging Abate’s years of service and commitment to the Board, believes that executive committee members should be held to term limits. Kalita, who was appointed by Markowitz’s office after responding to a vacancy posting in the Polish Daily News, contends, “five years should be the maximum for executive committee members. The current bylaws allow members to run unopposed year after year, and it’s really not healthy for the Board to not have a turnover in leadership.”
CB #1’s commitment to inaccessibility has frustrated so many that only around 10 persons current of the sitting 50 Boar members who, along with a group of 45 outsiders, regularly work to effect change through the Board.
Whereas vehement disagreements have splintered other Brooklyn Community Boards – CB #6 in Red Hook had members removed for weighing-in too vocally on the interminable Ikea debate – CB #1 seems to suffer from, at times, too great a feeling of familial loyalty. Many describe the elderly Chairman Abate as the board’s “grandpa,” and have reservations about pushing out the man who has occupied the chairman’s seat for longer than some board members have been community residents. As a result, most simply bed their frustrations and await the resignations of both Abate and Esposito.
It’s the strange juxtaposition of this pillow politics and CB #1’s provincial infighting that has many choosing to serve the board from an arms length away. One such individual is Philip DePaolo who has turned down continual appeals to apply for a board seat and instead assumes an advisory role on the Public Safety subcommittee, calling on his experience with People’s Firehouse, a Williamsburg nonprofit organization working with fire prevention, literacy, and community services.
Despite the seeming ever-present frustrations, many are quick to note the all-volunteer Board’s contributions to the Greenpoint and Williamsburg communities. While maybe not the picture of efficiency, CB #1 remains one of the borough’s most active, even if this activity takes the form of, as was earlier described, the very necessary process of hearing the permit requests of local bar and restaurant owners.
Its 197-a plans for Greenpoint and Williamsburg, adopted by the City Council in January of 2002, are the accomplishments that many are most proud of. Section 197-a of the New York City Charter authorizes community boards, amongst other community groups, to sponsor plans for the development, growth, and improvement of its neighborhoods.
CB #1’s 197-a plans, two of the City’s most progressive, sought to ensure the promotion of residential and commercial development in a way that preserves the community’s existing character, to improve public water front access and the amount of public open space, to promote clean and safe living and working environments, and to promote local economic development.
Citing their commitment to the two 197-a plans, the Board formally opposed the Department of City Planning’s original Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning proposal, eventually having the City’s final plan make some concessions to the standing 197-a’s, such as allowing for 20% of new residential units to be designated for affordable housing.
CB #1 Meeting at the Swinging 60's Senior Citizen Center
On Tuesday, January 24th, the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure subcommittee, the subcommittee that played an instrumental role in the Board’s rezoning response, will be holding a meeting at CB #1’s district office (435 Graham Avenue). On the 25th the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation subcommittee will be meeting at the Princess Manor (92 Nassau Avenue), and on the 26th the Transportation subcommittee will be meeting at CB #1’s district office (435 Graham Avenue). February’s Board meeting is scheduled for the evening of the 7th at the Swinging 60’s Senior Citizens Center (211 Ainslie Street). The Board’s complete meeting schedule is posted on their website, www.cb1brooklyn.org.
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The Three Kings Parade
Sunday, January 8th 2006
Also known as The Epiphany, Three Kings Day (Día de los Tres Reyes Magos) is a Christian celebration that commemorates the Biblical story of the three kings who followed the star of Bethlehem to bring gifts to the Christ child. According to the Biblical story, the Three Kings – named Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar – presented the Baby Jesus with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
Traditionally in Latin America, Three Kings Day is the gift-giving time, rather than Christmas Day. Just as it is common for children to leave cookies for Santa in the U.S., in Latin America children leave their shoes out on the night of January 5th as well as water and grass for the camels and horses, in hopes that the Three Kings would be generous. Children awaken on January 6th to find their shoes filled with toys and gifts.
This year’s parade started at Meeker and Graham Avenue and ended at Debevoise Street. Local children, community groups, and special guests like Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez and the three Juana Diaz kings walked along Graham Avenue accompanied by camels, donkeys, sheep and goats as they welcomed the arrival of the Three Kings with music, dancing and smiles.
