Perhaps to lighten the mood in announcing the somber final budget deal, Mayor Michael Bloomberg took a few subtle digs at the legislators in Albany and the mess they have created in state government.
At each, Council members behind him shared a hearty guffaw.
But the Council has its own history of straying from best practices.
Take, for example, the extraordinary action this month when the Council voted to approve a 17-story tower next to the Brooklyn Bridge that David Yassky, whose district the development would be in, voted against.
What was really extraordinary, however, was that it was in fact extraordinary at all.
City Council members are given wide deference to give the thumbs-up or thumbs down on projects in their home districts, with their 50 colleagues generally nodding along in passive agreement.
This brand of codified, encouraged NIMBYism is completely antithetical to how a serious deliberative body should go about its job.
If a project is worthless on its merits, Council members should, after careful consideration, vote it down, even if the “home” member approved the plan. That is why, after all, they were elected—to be stewards of this city, not sheep more interested in preserving comity in the Council chambers than taking care of the city.
In the case of the Dock Street Project, the issue was whether or not views of the Brooklyn Bridge outweigh a community’s need for affordable housing and for more middle school classroom space. Both arguments have their points. If only Council members had not been afraid or unwilling or uninterested to weigh in on either side, the city might have featured an arguably much needed debate on these issues.
No one doubts why legislators are given some latitude to determine the merits of the development projects in their home neighborhoods. They are the ones most knowledgeable about a project’s effect on local communities, they hear residents’ complaints the loudest, they are the ones ultimately responsible to local voters to improve the quality of life in their neighborhoods.
And surely the rest of the Council is too inundated with work to fully suss out the merits of all of the myriad development projects going on around the city.
But still, members seem too eager to pass off using their critical faculties in lieu of voting lockstep with their colleagues on major development projects. The truth, of course, is that the effects of most developments are not limited to the blocks around the site, but that in this organic, intertwined city, each project affects everyone in some way, no matter how far away we vote from where the shovels are actually going in the ground. If there is less affordable housing in DUMBO, the laws of cause and effect (and supply and demand) teach that there will be less affordable housing units in Ditmas Park and less in neighborhoods from Dyker Heights to Douglaston. And so on, through the various reverberations and ripples.
The city has gone down the road of this kind of balkanization before, to disastrous consequences. In the late 1960s, the Bundy Plan called for the creation of decentralized school boards that were mostly independent from the rest of the city. The result was a series of teacher strikes, and resentments that lingered for decades.
More recently, this issue came to a full boil during the Sonny Carson street naming controversy, when Council Member Charles Barron, who frequently does not defer to his colleagues on many local decisions, cleverly flipped the argument around and said that the deference given to Council members on zoning and land use decisions should also be applied for the relatively uncontroversial act of naming a street.
Surely, neighborhood concerns should be given a weight, even a disproportionate weight when the city undertakes massive new plans. But these cannot be the only concerns.
To let them become so risks turning the city into a collection of mini-fiefdoms where no one has the courage to sacrifice anything so that the city can better meet the challenges of the 21st century.
Even in the midst of a recession, serious planning and zoning decisions will continue to come before the Council in the months and weeks ahead. Legislators have a responsibility to take a passionate interest in each one, and approve—or disapprove—of each on the merits. For a Council that voted itself an extension of time in office on the basis of its insisted expertise, this should be a pretty basic one to live up to in the years ahead.
--
ABOVE: Photo by Andrew Schwartz
At each, Council members behind him shared a hearty guffaw.
But the Council has its own history of straying from best practices.
Take, for example, the extraordinary action this month when the Council voted to approve a 17-story tower next to the Brooklyn Bridge that David Yassky, whose district the development would be in, voted against.
What was really extraordinary, however, was that it was in fact extraordinary at all.
City Council members are given wide deference to give the thumbs-up or thumbs down on projects in their home districts, with their 50 colleagues generally nodding along in passive agreement.
This brand of codified, encouraged NIMBYism is completely antithetical to how a serious deliberative body should go about its job.
If a project is worthless on its merits, Council members should, after careful consideration, vote it down, even if the “home” member approved the plan. That is why, after all, they were elected—to be stewards of this city, not sheep more interested in preserving comity in the Council chambers than taking care of the city.
In the case of the Dock Street Project, the issue was whether or not views of the Brooklyn Bridge outweigh a community’s need for affordable housing and for more middle school classroom space. Both arguments have their points. If only Council members had not been afraid or unwilling or uninterested to weigh in on either side, the city might have featured an arguably much needed debate on these issues.
No one doubts why legislators are given some latitude to determine the merits of the development projects in their home neighborhoods. They are the ones most knowledgeable about a project’s effect on local communities, they hear residents’ complaints the loudest, they are the ones ultimately responsible to local voters to improve the quality of life in their neighborhoods.
And surely the rest of the Council is too inundated with work to fully suss out the merits of all of the myriad development projects going on around the city.
But still, members seem too eager to pass off using their critical faculties in lieu of voting lockstep with their colleagues on major development projects. The truth, of course, is that the effects of most developments are not limited to the blocks around the site, but that in this organic, intertwined city, each project affects everyone in some way, no matter how far away we vote from where the shovels are actually going in the ground. If there is less affordable housing in DUMBO, the laws of cause and effect (and supply and demand) teach that there will be less affordable housing units in Ditmas Park and less in neighborhoods from Dyker Heights to Douglaston. And so on, through the various reverberations and ripples.
The city has gone down the road of this kind of balkanization before, to disastrous consequences. In the late 1960s, the Bundy Plan called for the creation of decentralized school boards that were mostly independent from the rest of the city. The result was a series of teacher strikes, and resentments that lingered for decades.
More recently, this issue came to a full boil during the Sonny Carson street naming controversy, when Council Member Charles Barron, who frequently does not defer to his colleagues on many local decisions, cleverly flipped the argument around and said that the deference given to Council members on zoning and land use decisions should also be applied for the relatively uncontroversial act of naming a street.
Surely, neighborhood concerns should be given a weight, even a disproportionate weight when the city undertakes massive new plans. But these cannot be the only concerns.
To let them become so risks turning the city into a collection of mini-fiefdoms where no one has the courage to sacrifice anything so that the city can better meet the challenges of the 21st century.
Even in the midst of a recession, serious planning and zoning decisions will continue to come before the Council in the months and weeks ahead. Legislators have a responsibility to take a passionate interest in each one, and approve—or disapprove—of each on the merits. For a Council that voted itself an extension of time in office on the basis of its insisted expertise, this should be a pretty basic one to live up to in the years ahead.
--
ABOVE: Photo by Andrew Schwartz
