How do Community Board Chairs influence policy?
Chair is the most important role at my Community Board. The other leadership roles aren’t even close.
Before diving into the meat of this post, a few PSAs:
1. Start here if you need a refresher on what community boards are again.
2. You too can be a local policy influencer– Community Board applications are open! Links to apply here and due dates:
If you’re thinking about applying to your community board and want to chat, hit me up!🙋♀️
3. All takes are my own and not the views of Manhattan Community Board 5.
Okay, nowwww let’s talk about community board chairs.
I serve on Manhattan Community Board 5. Our bylaws designate a bunch of leadership positions– 6 total. There’s Treasurer, Secretary, Assistant Secretary, Vice Chair, and 2nd Vice Chair.
But when it comes to political power, the Chair is really it. Our current Chair’s name is Brad. His day job is in architecture, he’s in his early thirties, and he joined the community board in 2022 to get more involved in his community.
Here’s a rundown of the most powerful features of the role.
The Chair creates the committees.
Committees are the backbone of the board, where most of the substantive discussions and decisions take place. We have 6 committees, but other community boards have different amounts. Committees discuss and develop the policy and then the full board votes to approve it. In my time at CB5, I’ve never seen a resolution get sent back to committee or rejected by the full board. The full board always does what the committee recommends.
The Chair decides what committees exist. If Brad thinks Public Safety is super important, he can create a committee to weigh in on that. Yes, most community boards have a Land Use committee because the City Charter requires community boards to review rezonings. But beyond a couple typical committees, the Chair has free reign. And the Chair can even structure those “required committees” how they want– like Manhattan CB4 has separate Land Use committees: one for Chelsea and one for Hell’s Kitchen. The Chair sets the focus of each committee, which influences what issues their board weighs in on.
The Chair staffs the committees.
The chair can bias committees’ recommendations using intentional staffing. If Brad wanted to stack the Transportation committee with just car owners, he could do that. If Brad wanted to stack the Land Use committee with a bunch of people who hate tall buildings, he could do that too.
On CB5, each member serves on two committees, and each committee has about 15 people. Brad asked us for our preferences for which committees we wanted to be on, but it’s a tough matching process since fewer people want the grunt work committees and more people want the interesting committees. At the end of the day, Brad doesn’t have to take our preferences into consideration at all, he can just assign us however he wants. But we vote to elect our Chair, so if he wants to be re-elected, he can’t piss everyone off.
The Chair chooses who leads the committees
Brad can appoint a cannabis advocate to lead the weed store license committee—or he can appoint a strict prohibitionist who opposes all drugs entirely. He creates the committees, he staffs them, and he chooses who leads them.
Since committee chairs lead the process of developing policy recommendations, they wield a ton of influence over the outcome. Here’s more detail on how committee chairs wield influence:
Committee chairs manage committee meetings, potentially amplifying certain voices or silencing others. Committee chairs control time allocation and speaking order during their meetings. They decide who gets to speak and for how long, potentially amplifying certain voices or silencing others. For example, the Land Use Chair can ask their own questions about the policy proposal first, thereby steering discussion toward the topics they want to discuss most. The Land Use Chair can allow certain questions and disallow others, if they deem them outside the scope of the discussion. They can allow lots of time for questions to the agency leading the proposal, or they can limit questions. They can insert their own commentary before and after each comment. In these ways, they can pretty effectively sideline opinions that they disagree with. They can steer the goal of the meeting in a particular direction. The chair of the committee really sets the tone, culture, and structure of the meeting, which heavily influences the outcome.
Committee Chairs control the timing and amount of deliberation and public comment. The committee chair sets the agenda, determining which issues are discussed and prioritized. Topics they deem less important may not reach the table. Or they can crunch multiple items into one meeting, change the order of the items, or set aside time across multiple meetings for comment and deliberation on particularly complex items. Order and timing matter. Agenda items that start later at night often have fewer commenters and less visibility, because viewers give up and go to bed. Committee chairs can create lots of space for discussion, or not.
I’ve been on committees where the committee chair skillfully steers the committee to their preferred result. I’ve also been on committees where the committee chair facilitates open discussion, keeping the group on task, but not determining the outcome.
If Brad has an agenda, he can appoint committee chairs that align with his politics. Or he can appoint committee chairs that facilitate discussion across diverse viewpoints.
The Chair appoints public members.
Community board members are appointed by elected officials. But public members are appointed by the Chair. Public members are not full voting members of the community board – they don’t vote at full board meetings. Brad appoints them to a particular committee, and they just get to vote there.
This is important because Brad doesn’t control who are the 50 full board members. But he does control the number and makeup of public members on each committee– and if he wants to bias committee outcomes a certain way, that’s an avenue to do so.
Public members can significantly change the outcomes of proposals. For example, I’m on the Landmarks committee, which weighs in on preservation of historic buildings. The Landmarks committee has 17 members total, and 5 of them are public members who are all architects. In our last meeting, the 5 public members determined the outcome of a proposal through their sheer numbers on the committee. And in this case, our public members have a very strong voice in the committee not just because of their numbers, but also because they have strong opinions about architectural features like awnings and windows. They not only have expertise that the rest of us don’t have, they also have personal opinions on the way the city should treat historic buildings. When all 5 public members attend the meeting, the tenor of our conversations is definitely different.
The architect public members were actually appointed a while ago, before Brad was chair. But in general, when a Chair appoints public members, the Chair exercises their power to shape the demographics, and thereby the voice, of the whole board.
CB5 might be unique.
At CB5, our Chair is by far the most powerful role because he creates the committees, staffs them, and decides who leads them. He can also add public members, separate from the Borough President’s application process.
Interestingly, I’ve heard from friends who serve on other community boards that their boards are slightly different. Maybe their bylaws are different. Or maybe their community context is different. Some have said that their District Manager (the head staff person at the community board) is the most powerful person. Which would make sense– the District Manager’s full time job is the community board, whereas most Chairs have other full time jobs.
But whether you’re thinking about ways to influence your local community board or ways to facilitate consensus, these are some dynamics to consider.