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Q&A
Community engagement in City of Yes process and planning initiatives
0:43:51
ยท
175 sec
Council Member Selvena Brooks-Powers inquires about DCP's efforts to ensure meaningful engagement of residents, particularly in outer borough communities, in the City of Yes process and other planning initiatives. Dan Garodnick, Director of DCP, explains their comprehensive approach to community engagement.
- DCP has developed a dedicated team for reaching out to neighborhoods and communities previously not involved in the process.
- Engagement efforts include multiple meetings per community board, virtual town halls, neighborhood engagement, and council member-directed stakeholder meetings.
- DCP is working to make complex land use proposals more accessible through plain language annotations, illustrated work, and one-page guides.
Selvena Brooks-Powers
0:43:51
The first one is, how is DCP working to ensure that residents, particularly those in outer borough communities, are meaningfully engaged in the City of Yes process and other planning initiatives?
0:44:06
And then I'll wait for you to respond, and I'll ask the next one.
Dan Garodnick
0:44:10
Thank you very much for that question.
0:44:14
And I see your assistant in the background, and I like it.
0:44:17
Okay, so the short answer is we have developed our an entire team at the Department of City Planning whose job is to assist us in reaching neighborhoods, communities, community members who previously had not been part of the process.
0:44:37
We take very seriously our responsibility to community boards, that's defined in the charter, but we also know that there are many people who need to understand our processes and need to understand what we're talking about, and in language that they can understand.
0:44:51
I will note that I remember when I was in the shoes of a council member trying to digest some of the very, very technical land use proposals coming out of the city or even the Department of City Planning.
0:45:05
And I found it very, very difficult in short periods of time to actually grapple with and engage with and understand those details.
0:45:13
So, through this community engagement team, by way of illustration, when we were doing our engagement on citywide text amendments, that meant, you know, an average of about three meetings per community board.
0:45:27
It meant that we were doing public town halls virtually.
0:45:31
It meant that we were doing neighborhood engagement.
0:45:34
We were doing council member directed engagement with stakeholders.
0:45:37
It meant that we were annotating our proposal in plain language.
0:45:41
It meant that we were doing illustrated work to make it easier to understand one page guides to be able to more easily understand the specific subparts of the proposal.
0:45:53
All of this is an effort to try to make it easier for New Yorkers to understand our very complicated work, because it's very complicated, but it's also very important.
0:46:01
So we want to demystify this and make sure that people have as much opportunity to engage and to be heard.
0:46:07
And we're always looking to find ways to do better, and certainly welcome thoughts from you and your colleagues on how we can do that.
Rafael Salamanca
0:46:23
Yes.
0:46:24
I see you waving.
Selvena Brooks-Powers
0:46:27
Sorry.
0:46:27
I didn't realize they put that function to not allow ourselves to come on mute.
0:46:32
But, thank you for that response, and I definitely want to welcome DCP back into the district, as this city of yes is being implemented so that people can still continue to be a part of the process.