Dear Speaker Johnson and members of the City Council:
We are very
disappointed in the process and outcome of the School Siting Task Force,
created by
Local
Law No. 168 in Sept. 2018.
The law
mandated the creation of
an
“interagency
task force” to facilitate the acquisition of publicly and privately-owned
sites for schools.
Over 500,000 students
are crammed into overcrowded schools,
and in some communities, it has taken over 20 years for the DOE and the
School Construction A
uthority
to find suitable sites.
The law also mandated that this task
force should provide a report to the City Council no later than July 31, 2019
on their findings.
One of us, Shino Tanikawa, was appointed to the Task Force by the DOE, and the
first meeting was held privately on Feb. 26, 2019. Yet according to the
expert
opinion of the NY State Committee on Open Government, any task force or
advisory body created by law to have a specific governmental role is subject to
Open Meetings Law.
City Comptroller
Scott Stringer also
sent
a letter to the Chancellor and Lorraine Grillo, President of the SCA, urging
them to comply with
the law and
allow members of the public
to attend.
In our experience, such a critical issue as
facilitating school siting and planning to alleviate
overcrowding deserves transparency; and it is our experience that it is parents
and members of the community who often have the best and most useful
suggestions when it comes to these issues.
On May 2, Chancellor Carranza
and SCA President Lorraine Grillo
responded
to Comptroller Stringer’s letter, saying the public would be allowed to
attend future meetings, though they refused to concede that they were legally
obligated to do so:
Although we disagree with your position
that the Task Force is subject to the OML, we do not object to opening Task
Force meetings to the general public, consistent with our commitment to
community input and engagement. Accordingly, future meetings of the Task Force
will be open to the public.
Yet we heard nothing more about the Task Force until Shino received a message
on July 22 that the second and final meeting
of the Task Force would be held on Monday, July 29 at City Hall from 3-5 PM,
and that this meeting would be open to the public.
Five
months had gone by between Feb. 26 and July 29, without the Task Force meeting
once.
During that final meeting, Lorraine Grillo and her staff from the SCA projected
some spreadsheets, listing thousands of city-owned properties and
privately-owned land, the vast majority of which they had ruled out as
unsuitable for schools, because they were too small, not in the right areas, or
strangely configured. They said they had found only two sites out of more than
7,000 properties owned by the city that might be good sites for schools. In
addition, they said, they were continuing to explore and analyze some of the
privately-owned properties.
Their presentation only lasted about 15 minutes, and then Liz Hoffman of the
First Deputy Mayor’s office, who
was running the meeting, opened it up to questions. She was asked if the public
could receive a copy of these spreadsheets and she said no. She was asked if
the public would receive a copy of the report, and she said no that it would be
sent to the City Council on July 31, as specified in the law.
According to Shino and Kaitlyn
O’Hagan, the City Council representative to the Task Force, neither one of them
had even seen a copy of the task force report or was asked for any input before
a draft was provided to the Council on July 31.
Shino requested that the
draft report be shared with her and was told the final report would be shared only after the City Council reviewed it. It was not until
City Council staff stepped in that the report was sent to the entire Task
Force. In any case, the report is only one and a half pages long.
Whether or not the
deliberations of this Task Force and this report comply with the intent and/or
language of Local Law No. 168, it is hugely regrettable that rather than
welcome collaboration with parents and advocates, the city continues to
restrict it.
We urge you to re-start the
entire process of this Task Force, ensure that it holds regular meetings
open to the public, includes
representatives from more stakeholder groups, releases all the relevant data, and solicits input from parents and community
members.
If the Mayor’s office objects,
we urge you to amend the legislation to require these provisions. We would be happy to work with you to finalize
the language of an amended law. Tackling
the problem of school overcrowding is too important an issue to let this Task
Force end with a one-and-a-half-page report from the SCA.
Yours sincerely,
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