Preliminary CB Bylaws Survey
39/59 CBs have publicly posted bylaws // many are out of date, hard to read, hard to find // the Bylaws Survey work will continue, volunteers welcome
If you’re on mobile, click the image above for an interactive version of the graphic. Click here to find out which community district (each of which is overseen by a community board) you live in.
I’m working on a general survey of Community Board administrative readiness, and my first step was to take a look at their bylaws. Why?
Bylaws are the basic organizing document of each Community Board. They detail their officers, important procedures like voting, parliamentary authorities, committee rules, and more.1
Properly, CB bylaws should be public, accessible, legible, and well-written. Not just for members of the public who want to know how their CB works, but for CB members themselves! How can CB members, especially new ones, be expected to operate well without accessible bylaws? That’s like asking someone to play a game but refusing to give them the rulebook.
What I found after my survey: in practice, very few bylaws are accessible, legible, and/or well-written, and many are not posted at all.2
The state of our CB bylaws is a proxy for the administrative state of the CBs in general: their record keeping, their transparency, their legality, and their commitment to their essential purpose: to be the part of government closest to the people.
Quick Bylaws Stats
20/59 CBs do not post their bylaws (or at least I could not find them—I’m happy to have corrections here!).3
Of the 39/59 CBs that do post their bylaws, many are hard to find, out of date, and/or hard to read. There are a few bylaws that are so out-of-date and unreadable that they might as well not be posted—it would be less confusing.
Bylaw posting rate by borough:
Brooklyn: 13/18 posted (72%)
Queens: 7/14 posted (50%)
Manhattan: 12/12 posted (100%)
The Bronx: 6/12 posted (50%)
Staten Island: 1/3 posted (33%)
When I was doing my initial survey, I ranked bylaws according to three factors:
Presence of a table of contents (TOC); if you’ve ever tried to read most bylaws without them, it’s hard to navigate. And if it’s your first time trying to read bylaws without a TOC, you’ll quickly be overwhelmed trying to keep the whole document in your head. They are an essential accessibility tool.
Are the bylaws up-to-date? If bylaws contain expired provisions, incorrect information, or are very old (for the purposes of my survey, this means the most recent adopted bylaws are prior to 2000), I marked them out of date. If you’re a member of the public and you see expired information in what is a relatively short document, it immediately throws suspicion on everything else in them. You also wonder whether you’re seeing the most recently adopted version of the document.
Are the bylaws legible? Formatting, typesetting, and more all contribute to legibility—can you read them easily? Some bylaws are just walls of text with no styling or headers, and this is essentially unreadable. No citizen should have to deal with formatting what is in effect the CBs most important document themselves in order to read it. And CB members should have an easy-to-read governing document!
This is just the preliminary survey. Future versions will rank CB bylaws, and the CBs, on a wider variety of factors.
I welcome corrections and updates to my own data! The point of this document isn’t to call anyone out, but to get things fixed and in good shape. We can do a tremendous amount together, and this is what the great spirit of New York City demands.
More to come. Let me know if you want to help!
Excelsior.
Andrew is looking at bylaws from an open data perspective, and has a useful graphic for understanding bylaws in this post.
For Bronx CB4, I had to Google to find a link to their bylaws (they weren’t on the CB4 website). I was taken to some outdated city website that was having some kind of problem, and it makes me wonder what’s going on with these bylaws generally.
For Brooklyn CB5, I had to find an older version of their website through the internet archive, since their site is currently undergoing maintenance.
The basic thing I want to communicate: just because bylaws are somewhere online doesn’t mean most people will be able to find them.
There are a few reasons why this could be. One could just be administrative oversight—no one thought to post the bylaws, or check that they were posted. Another could be that no one on the board thinks public, accessible bylaws are important enough to post. Another could be that boards do not want their bylaws to be easily accessible, which is strange given the close-to-the-people nature of CBs (Brooklyn CB8 explicitly does not make their bylaws public, for example).