Brewer questions CEC on borough president appointment processes
Brewer asks whether CEC has a sense of whether each borough president has a robust vetting process for community board members. Salter says all borough presidents conduct interviews and process applications, and Brewer reiterates her concern that council members lack staff for similar vetting.
Yes.
We consult with the borough president's offices.
Your office, when you were there and it was...
Superstar.
Superstar, for sure.
So, yes, you offered a lot of those changes, not all the BPs.
I looked at that list, Benjamin, every single one of AI.
Go ahead.
I get it.
I get it.
Not every board does that.
You'll see that we are mandated to do a lot of land use trainings, but that is something that the borough presidents do across the board.
So we offer occasional ones, but we know that we don't want to be duplicative.
So we are asked to do certain trainings.
We look at the board members.
We ask surveys from them what they want to do, and we try to fulfill those needs.
We had heard the ad.
We had heard that it was being used and poorly, so we implemented that.
You know, with the parliamentary procedure, which was one that we offered a lot, that is now required to be held by BPs, so we have stopped offering that one.
You know, there's only so many trainings we can offer every year.
All board members are busy.
They have a lot of meetings.
We basically offer sort of one a week, I think, if I did the math.
So we offer what we hear the board members asking.
Okay.
And then in terms of, I know you're not taking positions, I just heard, on these bills, but do you feel that, do you have any sense of,
whether or not each borough president has a process, I know Manhattan does, for implementing, I would say, quality community board members versus just, in the old days, it was political.
It was a bad situation.
So that has changed in Manhattan, I assume elsewhere.
Do you have some sense of how it works across the board, or you don't pay attention to that?
No, no, we talked to them about that.
I mean, certainly...
Process.
Sorry.
No, go ahead.
They all do the interviews that I know of.
I don't deal as much with Staten Island.
We don't talk to them as much, but happy to.
We just don't.
But they do an interview process.
They get the applications.
We talk to them about where the applications are coming from.
So I feel that they do all have a process that is pretty robust.
Okay.
Because it seems to me.
that as a council member, I know I don't have the staff to do something similar.
So that's why I feel very strongly that the process is important.
Otherwise, you will have people who are just friends and not going through vetting.