VOLUME 30, NUMBER 05
CB1 revamps committees BY DENNIS LYNCH Community Board 1 is doing away with its unique geographic-based committee system in favor of issue-based, district-wide committees with the hope it will help streamline the board’s work and better serve the district. The board eliminated the Financial District, Seaport/Civic Center, and Tribeca committees and added two new ones: Licensing and Permits, and Resiliency, Waterfronts, and Parks. The board is actually resurrecting the latter committee, which had existed in the past, but added resiliency to the docket of the panel overseeing Downtown’s waterfront and parks. It has also tweaked the titles and roles of some other committees. The Landmarks Committee has added “Preservation” to its title, and the Quality of Life Committee has added “Service Delivery,” highlighting that it will address how “the city delivers the proper services all our citizens deserve,” such as sanitation, public safety, and traffic control, according to board chairman Anthony Notaro. The board will keep the Battery Park City Committee, since that neighborhood is a state-run entity and so has unique issues not shared by the rest of Community District 1. It will also keep the Youth and Education Committee, the Planning Committee, and the Personnel Committee (which handles mostly internal business). The Planning Committee’s role was considered “too wide ranging,” Notaro said, so it will now be focused more on land use, including zoning issues and Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) applications. The role of the Executive Committee will also shift to focus more on developing broader strategies to deal with community issues, whereas before it concentrated on the board’s operational operations. The board will keep its Street Fair Task Force, but add the a task force to “look at issues about health, seniors, homeless and housing” and come up with ways the board can address them,” Notaro said. It’s the first change in the committee structure in more than three decades. Notaro said the new structure will allow committee members to build expertise on the topics they cover, and so be better able to perform their jobs. “Everyone has some issues locally, but the major
MARCH 09 – March 22, 2017
City fails math
DOE’s own school-needs formula proves city not planning enough seats for D’town BY COLIN MIXSON Downtown’s school overcrowding task force has forecast an urgent need for 626 additional schools seats south of Canal Street — based on the same algorithms city bureaucrats use — and yet the
city has no plans to accommodate the influx. Despite the obviously impending deficit, the Department of Education has not even begun the agonizingly slow process of citing and building a new school —
which can take several years in crowded, pricey Lower Manhattan, according to task force member Eric Greenleaf. “We face a very real possibility that, if the city waits a few schools Continued on page 14
F earle s s
Photo by Milo Hess
The sculpture, called “The Fearless Girl,” by artist Kristen Visbal was placed at the northern tip of Bowling Green facing down the iconic “Charging Bull” late Tuesday, on the eve of International Women’s Day, as part of a campaign by finance company State Street Corporation to promote women in leadership in the financial sector. For more on the public art stunt, see page 4.
committees Continued on page 10 1 M e t r o t e c h • N YC 112 0 1 • C o p y r i g h t © 2 0 17 N YC C o mm u n i t y M e d i a , L L C