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TESTIMONY
Testimony by Keri Butler from the Municipal Arts Society (MAS) on comprehensive planning and ULURP reforms
1:33:24
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3 min
Keri Butler, Interim President of the Municipal Arts Society (MAS), testifies in support of the Thriving Communities Coalition's comprehensive planning proposal and offers specific ULURP reform ideas.
MAS supports increasing ULURP efficiency and transparency via formalized pre-certification, concurrent reviews, potentially changing review order, or an appeals panel.
They also suggest evaluating which actions require ULURP and potentially giving CPC final authority on minor projects, but oppose fast-tracking that compromises input, incentivizing city land disposition, adding pre-cert time limits, or consolidating decisions solely with the Mayor/Council.
Keri Butler
1:33:24
Hi.
1:33:25
My name is Carrie Butler.
1:33:26
I am the interim president of the Municipal Arts Society.
1:33:30
And MAS does support the Thriving Communities Coalition's draft text for comprehensive planning.
1:33:37
We are a member of that coalition.
1:33:39
But today, I'm going to focus on ULURP, the funnest, wonky topic.
1:33:46
So it's also a notoriously expensive and risky process, especially for smaller and nonprofit developers, and it can be opaque and confusing for community members.
1:33:58
I think there were a lot of important topics that were touched on today, including community members having a lack of resources and knowledge about land use process, how complicated it can be.
1:34:10
MAS does try to do, some of that work with our livable neighborhoods program, but it is it is complicated.
1:34:18
And I also have heard and I'm going a little off script here.
1:34:22
Sorry.
1:34:22
But I also have heard from many people that it is the time before you lurp that can be most risky because it's so unknown, and it has a lot of to do with personal, I guess, opinions and things, you know, in the process.
1:34:40
And I think there's also an importance to note that there's city planning's process when they wanna rezone and do a neighborhood plan where they have been, I think, doing a really good job of going into the community for an extended period of time.
1:34:54
But then you have private developers.
1:34:56
So there's different types of processes here.
1:35:00
So there have been a lot of proposals shared, and I'm just gonna go through some of the things that MAS supports as quickly as I can.
1:35:09
We support increasing efficiency and improving transparency and reducing the timeline if possible.
1:35:15
Perhaps that would be establishing, as I said, about the pre process, establishing a formalized precertification phase to reduce uncertainty, having perhaps community boards and borough presidents conduct concurrent reviews.
1:35:31
You perhaps could change the order of reviews, so shifting city council to before the borough president or having them happen concurrently, establishing an appeals panel.
1:35:43
Perhaps it would be members of different representatives, city planning, community board, borough president, and the council.
1:35:49
Evaluating the scope of actions that require ULURP, there are 12 categories, some of which are often bypassed because of due due to city planning's rulemaking authority.
1:36:01
I think we should establish a transparent process for regular city planning evaluation of these actions subject to ULURP to both remove those that are outdated, but also perhaps incorporating new categories as environments change, allowing CPC final decision making authority on a selection of smaller scale or CPC determined low impact products projects?
1:36:25
Okay.
1:36:26
Can I just real quickly say which we don't?
1:36:28
We are strongly opposed to incentivizing the disposition of city owned property to expedite short term development.
1:36:36
This will compromise the city's long term flexibility and control and weaken the ability to leverage those assets to achieve broader housing climate goals in our future.
1:36:45
We oppose fast tracking for specific uses, because it could lead to inadequate community input, incomplete impact assessments, and dimension project quality.
1:36:57
And we do not propose adding time limits to application or precertification processes as those have shown poor results in other cities.
1:37:08
And we strongly oppose consolidating ULURP decision making within major city mayor excuse me, within the mayor or city council.