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PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Mark Diller, District Manager of Manhattan Community Board 2
4:57:23
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3 min
Mark Diller, District Manager of Manhattan Community Board 2, testifies about the challenges faced by community boards, particularly regarding increased responsibilities and the need for more funding. He emphasizes the difficulties in managing hybrid meetings and the strain on resources due to new expectations post-COVID.
- Highlights the high volume of outdoor dining applications (20-25 per week) that community boards must process
- Discusses the technical and logistical challenges of conducting hybrid meetings to meet public engagement expectations
- Emphasizes the need for increased funding to support community boards' role in local democracy
Mark Diller
4:57:23
Good afternoon.
4:57:24
Thank you for the opportunity to join my colleagues.
4:57:27
My name is Mark Diller.
4:57:28
I am the current district manager of Community Board two in Manhattan, which serves Greenwich Village, SoHo, NYU, Nolita, etcetera.
4:57:37
I am also the former chair, four term chair of Community Board seven on the Upper West Side Of Manhattan, in part thanks to Councilmember Brewer's appointment.
4:57:45
So I've seen this budget issue on both sides of the service that community boards render.
4:57:53
And we've had to do more with less for twenty years or more.
4:57:59
To amplify one of the aspects, outdoor dining, we receive about 20 to 25 applications every week, including Passover, Christmas, and New Years.
4:58:10
We struggle to keep up.
4:58:12
Our our our committee meets three to four times a month.
4:58:16
This is not, as my colleague mentioned, not just paperwork.
4:58:21
We're making sure that applications are available online in redacted form in order to encourage community engagement on these issues.
4:58:30
The part that I'd like to focus in on is the hybrid meeting portion of our responsibilities.
4:58:36
Since COVID, the public expects to be able to come to our meetings from any location that they happen to find themselves, and as people committed to public engagement, we think this is a good thing.
4:58:48
The issue, of course, is that there's a blessing and a curse that comes with Zoom.
4:58:52
It's easy to hold a meeting in person.
4:58:54
It's easy to hold a meeting on Zoom.
4:58:56
We all learned that during COVID, but it still is a huge effort to do both at the same time and have everyone be able to hear each other.
4:59:03
That is exacerbated by a confusing provision, section 2,800 h of the city chartering code, that makes community boards responsible for making their meetings available for broadcast.
4:59:20
Words that no one seems to know how to interpret, but that the controller's office faults us for not doing.
4:59:27
There are, as noted, fewer venues that can accommodate us.
4:59:30
I'll leave that to my colleague.
4:59:32
And then just observe that I'm not a DJ.
4:59:35
So we don't have the staff to hire professionals to produce a reliable hybrid meeting.
4:59:45
I was lucky that I had a budget gap because I was shortfall in hiring.
4:59:50
A budget gap that I used to buy a bunch of equipment that I now schlep all over the West Village in an attempt to have folks hear us both in the room and at home with mixed results.
5:00:01
Ask any of your colleagues who've come to our meetings and they'll tell you that there are some frustrations involved, including one time in which an elected official was talking on Zoom and another was talking in the room at the same time and they didn't know it.
5:00:13
That's not good public engagement.
5:00:17
And the cost of doing this professionally is beyond the means of a community board.
5:00:22
So if we're really serious about democracy, community boards are where it's at.
5:00:26
We ask you to fund us accordingly.
5:00:27
Thank you.