Community Board 1 (CB1), the body that serves as the official voice of Lower Manhattan in dealing with elected officials and government agencies, is undergoing a major reorganization. Anthony Notaro, who took over as chair last summer, announced at CB1’s February meeting that he planned to eliminate three of the Board’s four geographic committees, which focus on specific neighborhoods, while also creating two new committees and streamlining those that remain.
“I’ve come up with some changes,” Mr. Notaro began at the February 28 session. “Today, we have essentially ten committees and one task force,” which focuses on street fairs. “We live in a different world than we did ten or 15 years ago,” he said, pointing to the rebuilding or new construction of more than 10 million square feet of residential, office, and retail space in Lower Manhattan, driven by more than $40 billion in investment, along with the rapid increase in residential population and the attendant massive pressure on infrastructure and services like schools, public safety, sanitation and transportation. “But we’re doing the same thing and expecting different results,” Mr. Notaro reflected.
“What’s our mandate?” he asked rhetorically, and then answered, “land use, service delivery, and resident input. That’s not to say we shouldn’t weigh in on other important issues. But our bread and butter needs to be in these areas.”
“How do we become more effective? How do we leverage the success and knowledge that we’ve acquired in the last 16 years since September 11? And how do we tackle the same problems as one organization, and not repeat it four different times?” he asked. “I believe it’s true that most of our problems today are really City-wide, or district-wide problems. We need to engage every member and every brain on that.”
Among the geographic committees, those focused on the Financial District, Tribeca, and the Seaport/Civic Center will be abolished. Only the Battery Park City Committee will remain, because, Mr. Notaro explained, “this is the one community that has a governing entity that has a relationship with us,” in a reference to the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA). “They collect taxes, they own the property, and they collect ground rent,” he added, in a reference to the exotic nature of property ownership in Battery Park City, where homeowners, landlords, and developers do not own outright the land they occupy, but instead lease the space (through the year 2069), in exchange for yearly payments of ground rent, as well as so-called “payments in lieu of taxes.” Mr. Notaro continued, “they also provide security, landscaping, even some sanitation. So I have continued that committee, but it is confined to issues that are based on the relationship between our residents and that Authority.”
The Battery Park City Committee will no longer consider issues such as liquor license applications or permits for street events, like as parades and runs, which Mr. Notaro found to comprise the majority of agenda items for each of the four geographic committees in recent years. Instead, this function will be folded into a new CB1 committee, Licensing and Permits, which will focus exclusively on these topics.
“When this committee meets,” he explained, “it will be organized by geographic area. So instead of seeing a list of addresses or names of applicants, there will be a section for the Financial District, a section for Tribeca, a section for Battery Park City, and a section for Seaport — so that people know what’s happening in their neighborhoods. It’s important to have not only consistency, but also local adaptation. This is not to say that hours of operation should be the same in every neighborhood. They should not. People from each neighborhood should speak up about what their needs and desires are.”
The second new panel that Mr. Notaro plans to create will be a Resiliency, Waterfront and Parks Committee. “Being surrounded on three sides by water and having suffered through Superstorm Sandy, resiliency is the number-one issue today for CB1,” he said, adding that this new panel, “will focus on both short- and mid-term solutions, as will as a complete coastal resiliency plan.” He also noted that because Lower Manhattan’s waterfront consists almost entirely of parks, such as the Battery, the Battery Park City Esplanade, the emerging East River Esplanade, and the Hudson River Park, and that these form a physical barrier, making them the first line of defense again future extreme weather events, “all three are naturally intertwined.”
An older CB1 panel that will be repurposed is the Planning Committee, which will expand to become the Land Use, Planning, and Economic Development Committee, responsible for reviewing all applications related to land use and zoning. Mr. Notaro noted that CB1 is unusual in that it faces the twin challenges of older buildings being repurposed (often for residential use), “along with new development of residential towers overlaid on a streetscape that is the oldest in the City.”
The existing Landmarks Committee will continue, now called Landmarks and Preservation, Mr. Notaro said. Also carrying on much as before will be the Youth and Education Committee, which oversees local schools and recreational facilities, as well as programming and public safety for children. Additionally remaining in operation will the CB1’s Executive Committee (made up of the chairs and co-chairs of all the committees, and CB1’s elected officers) and the Personnel Committee, which manages the community board staff, and interviews public members of CB1.
The current Quality of Life Committee will be rebranded as the Quality of Life and Service Delivery Committee, which will have a new focus on a core mandate for all community boards: access to government services, such as public safety, sanitation, and transportation, while also monitoring ongoing concerns, such as the local impact of large construction projects. “It’s important for service delivery to build a relationship with the agencies that we should hold responsible,” Mr. Notaro observed about this committee’s enhanced role.
In addition to maintaining the current Street Fair Task Force, CB1 will now also have a Human and Senior Services Task Force, which Mr. Notaro said will address, “health services, services to veterans and seniors, homelessness, and housing issues. This committee will look at those topics, prioritize them, decide what is important for us, and how do we attack that.”
Under Mr. Notaro’s plan, which is slated to take effect on April 1, CB1 will go from ten committees and one task force to nine committees and two task forces.
