With little fanfare and some disappointment, yesterday's second and final meeting of the School Siting Task Force was held
Yesterday the second, and it turned out, the final meeting of the School Siting Task Force was held. Reports of this disappointing meeting were published in the Daily News and the Wall Street Journal today.
To recap: In their Planning to Learn report, released in March 2018, the City Council made several proposals to speed up the process of school planning and siting, whose generally slow pace has contributed to over 500,000 NYC students being consigned to overcrowded schools.
In some neighborhoods where the schools are overcrowded, twenty years or more have lapsed without a new one being built, because of the apparent inability of the School Construction Authority (SCA) and the DOE to identify locations, even when these schools have been funded in the capital plan.
The SCA has only four real estate brokers citywide on retainer to help them to find suitable sites, and these brokers never "cold call" or reach out to owners to see if they might sell their properties to the city before they are put on the open market. Cold calling is considered a "must" in the hot real estate market that is NYC.
The Council’s Planning to Learn report suggested that a process be created to "Improve the school site identification process … that would review City real estate transactions to identify opportunities for SCA. Additionally, the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) should alert the Department of Education (DOE) and SCA if a property of appropriate size for a school becomes available."
As a result, the City Council passed Local Law No. 168 in Sept. 2018 to create an “interagency task force to review relevant city real estate transactions to identify opportunities for potential school sites,” including “city-owned buildings, city-owned property and vacant land within the city to evaluate potential opportunities for new school construction or leasing for school use.” The law also said that this task force should provide a report to the City Council no later than July 31, 2019 on their findings.
The first meeting of this task force was held privately on Feb. 26, 2019. After I heard about it, I asked the City Council and the DOE if subsequent meetings would be open to the CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: With little fanfare and some disappointment, yesterday's second and final meeting of the School Siting Task Force was held