This is NOT the official website for Community Board #1.
Their official site is located at: www.cb1.org
This is the response from Julie Menin
We should restore annual elections with two year term limits for the officers of the board starting in 2006.
The term limits on the various community boards throughout the five boroughs vary widely from annual elections with a two year term limit (for example Board 2-Manhattan), elections every year with no term limits (Board 11-Manhattan), elections every two years for a total of four years (Board 10-Manhattan), elections every five years (Board 7-Queens) and many other variations. My understanding is that the majority of the boards do, however, have annual elections.
If I am elected chair, I will appoint a By-Laws Committee to review the board's bylaws and internal workings, and this task force would make a recommendation for the consideration of the full board about the frequency of elections and whether to make changes to the term limits. This will also be a good opportunity to review the procedures concerning the forum for candidates during an election and the possibility of allowing for a longer question and answer period.
All community board and committee meetings must be open to the public.
I am strongly committed to upholding The New York State Open Meetings Law (OML), which requires that Community Board meetings be open to the public except in specific circumstances defined in that law. In those exceptional instances, the procedure outlined in the OML enabling the board to go into executive session must be followed.
We should have a detailed explanation as to the relationship of "Friends of CB1" and the actual board and the paid staff.
I would recommend that a task force on the internal workings of the board review the Friends of CB1 and its relationship to the community board. The committee would report back to the full board with their recommendations.
We should encourage participation of all members of the board and reduce the impact from the Executive Committee.
I would wholeheartedly encourage maximum participation from every single member of the board. I would expand the Executive Committee and make it more inclusive and more representative of the board. In my opinion, the board is currently factionalized and it is imperative that the board be made more inclusive. There are enormous untapped reserves of talent on our board which should be utilized.
We should institute more "subject matter" committees that are CB-wide (such as a Quality of Life committee and a Land Use Committee.)
I strongly support reinstituting the Quality of Life Committee to address the numerous noise, construction and environmental concerns, as well as city service issues, which we will face during the ten year construction period. I believe, however, that liquor licenses should remain within the geographic committees who are best suited to address them. It is extremely important that the Quality of Life committee be "CB"-wide as the noise, construction and air quality impacts of all the reconstruction projects are cumulative in effect.
We should remove the clause from our bylaws that permits the Executive Committee (instead of the full board as the charter states) to remove a member for cause
We should amend our bylaws in accordance with the New York City Charter, which states that members may be removed by a vote of the majority of the members of the Community Board. The Charter assigns this responsibility to the full board and not the Executive Committee
Now that the full board voted to approve the street fairs to raise our board's budget, I would like some discussion on whether the funds raised should go to a community group or to increase staff salaries.
I believe it would be appropriate to have a discussion about how to allocate funds from street fairs sponsored by the Community Board. A task force on the internal workings of the board would be an appropriate place to initiate this discussion.