Chair Riley asks about borough office role in private application review
He is concerned centralizing work will reduce local consideration; Garodnick says Sprint team works in coordination with borough offices, and borough offices still handle large-scale applications and neighborhood plans.
Will the planners and the urban designers at the DCP borough offices have any role in reviewing private applications going forward?
I'm concerned that centralizing this part of DCP's work will reduce consideration for local neighborhood conditions and priorities.
Absolutely.
So I just would note that in creating our sprint team, we went through a pretty extensive process review and reform process.
We didn't hire outside consultants.
We worked internally, bringing in folks from all disciplines and all boroughs across the team to really design.
this process.
We have a segment of applications that will potentially be exempt from secret review.
These applications will be led by our sprint team who again will work in coordination and have direct lines of communication.
So what role will the borough office play then?
Sure, so they will have direct lines of communication to our borough offices around applications.
I will note that there's also folks from our borough offices who express interest in joining this team.
So there's a normal exchange between the work that we do in central office and our borough offices.
Our borough offices also have the vast majority of applications that are large scale that have seek review as well as our neighborhood plans, our work with community boards and all the work that we need to do to push our planning agenda forward.
Okay.