The Problem With Local Government

I care a lot about politics. Politicians control our rights and our country, so I think their decisions have a real impact on our lives. I kept up with the Supreme Court rulings this summer, and I felt crushed when their decision on affirmative action was made public. I stayed up all night on Election Day in 2020, and I’ve been following the 2024 primaries. I also consider myself a reasonably well-informed person: I read The New York Times and BBC News often, and I try to get news from other sources. In other words, I am part of the large group of Stuyvesant students who pay attention to current events.

That’s why I was so surprised by my utter lack of knowledge when I began to attend the meetings held by my neighborhood’s community board. For a long time, I didn’t even know what a community board was. Community boards are groups of representatives who make decisions for their respective districts. They have control over a variety of issues, including land use and budgeting. There are 59 boards in all of New York City, and each one represents between 50,000 and 200,000 New Yorkers. While the majority of New Yorkers know who the president and the mayor are, very few know the members of their community board, much less the political beliefs and goals of those representatives. 

Community boards are often overlooked for a few reasons. First, the members of community boards are not elected; they’re chosen by the borough presidents. As a result, people have little motivation to know about their board members. If individuals take no part in the making of the board, they have no incentive to learn anything about the board’s purpose or impact.

Second, community board meetings are typically long and boring. They take a long time to make seemingly inconsequential decisions. At one meeting I attended, the board members spent half an hour debating whether they should allow the owner of a brownstone to fix up the handrails in front of their house. I felt as though I was watching a group of toddlers squabble over a silly, unimportant conflict. Making those small choices is the board’s job, of course, but the structure of the decision-making process makes board meetings very difficult to stomach.

Third, national politics increasingly overshadows local government, even though individuals have more control over local government. As a high schooler, I have almost no influence over the presidential election. No one can single-handedly change the course of a national election. On the other hand, even high schoolers can have substantial influence over their local government. A small body making local decisions is more likely to listen to an individual’s concerns than the U.S. Congress, which represents all 330 million U.S. citizens. Furthermore, local government has a more direct impact on the people in the community it represents, as it decides how to allocate resources within that community. People can almost always make a difference by being involved within their communities, whereas getting into messy arguments about national politics on social media accomplishes nothing.

If the members of a community aren’t actively involved in their local government, then the people making decisions aren’t accountable for the consequences of their actions. New York City should take steps to make local government, specifically community boards, more interesting and accessible to all New Yorkers.

Community board members should be chosen through democratic elections. That way, members of the neighborhood would at least know that the board exists, and they would have some motivation to learn about their representatives. However, it is important to acknowledge that most board members don’t have the money or time to campaign. Forcing candidates to campaign would privilege wealthy members of the neighborhood because they are able to take more time off work and advertise more easily. To solve that problem, community boards should receive funding to inform their district’s residents of the candidates running for the board. This can be done through the distribution of informational pamphlets or the creation of a website that explains the different candidates’ politics and their contributions to the community.

Unfortunately, providing information and holding elections isn’t enough to ensure that people will actually vote. The 2021 New York City mayoral election is a great example: it had a 21 percent voter turnout rate. Voter turnout in local elections would only increase if a major cultural shift occurred. Right now, many New Yorkers feel as though their vote doesn’t have any concrete impact. If high schools in New York City were to introduce a civics class that devoted equal amounts of time to local politics and national politics, people might be more inclined to vote in both community and federal elections.

Increasing awareness of local politics would require major changes, but it would be worth it in the end. The point of having a local government is so that representatives can be more responsive to individual communities’ needs, and that can only be achieved if people interact with their community’s representatives.