Letter to City Council and Speaker Regarding School Siting Task Force
For more on the School Siting Task Force, see recent articles in the Daily News and Wall Street Journal. We will update this post when we receive a response from the Speaker.
August 6, 2019
August 6, 2019
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 Authority 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 withthe 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.
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
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
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