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REMARKS
Chair Richard R. Buery Jr. on the Charter Revision Commission's goals and the preliminary staff report
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3 min
Chair Richard R. Buery Jr. opens the public meeting of the Charter Revision Commission, outlining its mission to improve city government with a key focus on the housing crisis.
He explains that this meeting is an opportunity for commissioners to discuss the preliminary staff report, which summarizes testimony and proposes ideas.
The commission is independent and will finalize recommendations for voters based on its judgment.
- The primary focus is to amend the city charter to make it easier to build more housing.
- Gratitude is expressed to New Yorkers who have provided testimony.
- The next public hearing will be in Brooklyn on May 19th.
- More details are available at nyc.gov/charter.
Richard R. Buery Jr.
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My name is Richard Bury.
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I am I have the honor to serve as the chair of this commission.
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Our our purpose is to look at ways to make the city government more responsive, more transparent, and more effective, through the, tool of the city charter or city's governing document.
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One of our primary focus has been, to see how we can address the housing crisis, through the tool of the city charter.
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As everybody here knows, we face as a city, truly a housing crisis.
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The status quo is not working.
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It is clearly time to do something different.
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And one of our primary focus has been to make sure that we think about what ways the city charter can be amended to help that become possible and make it easier to build more housing for more New Yorkers.
0:01:00
Over the past several months, we've had the honor of hearing from New Yorkers across the five boroughs on the issue of affordable housing, but also on many other issues ranging from expanding our democracy to ensuring that our nonprofit partners who provide vital services are paid on time for their work.
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And I know I can speak for all of our commissioners, my fellow commissioners, when I say that we've taken all of our testimony that we've received very seriously.
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We've read through numbers of written reports.
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I'm gonna, express my gratitude to every New Yorker who has come forward either in writing or in person to share what they've learned with us.
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We appreciate it.
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One thing I wanna note is that this commission, though appointed by the mayor, is independent commission, which means that our recommendations that we will ultimately make to the city voters is bound by our judgment and our expertise.
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We will pursue ideas regardless of who proposed them and regardless of who supports them.
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And earlier this month, the commission staff led by our executive director, Alex Schoenbeck, put together this preliminary report.
0:02:07
This preliminary report really reflects a summary of what we've heard so far, the staff's broad ideas about how to address some of the issues that we are facing based on the expert testimony we received.
0:02:21
And this hearing is really an opportunity for the commission to engage with the staff as a group on those topics, to hear about the recommendations, to ask questions, to give our feedback as we work towards, finalizing our recommendations to the voters.
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This is a public meeting.
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I'll remind our commissioners that this is a public meeting.
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Everything that is discussed is a matter of public record.
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And although we are not hearing testimony in this meeting, we are, of course, hopefully have folks who are listening in and hearing about our progress in these conversations.
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The next public hearing of the commission, where we will be receiving testimony will be in, the great borough of Brooklyn at Medgar Evers College on May 19 on a Monday.
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You can find more details on that in future hearings, including how to submit testimony, whether whether written or otherwise, at nyc.gov/charter.
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That is nyc.gov/charter.
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We are joined here, by many of our co commissioners, vice chair Sharon Greenberger, Grace Bonilla, Anthony Richardson, Shams DeBaron, Carl Weisbrot, Anita Lermott, Diane Sevino, Leila Borzog, Julie's not here, and Katherine Wilde, are here with us today.
0:03:45
So we're gonna hear a presentation, from Alec about the what's in the report.
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Again, the commission will have time to engage and ask questions.
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And from there, we will move forward.