Queens community board says it won’t meet in-person despite orders
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Queens Community Board 6 will continue to meet remotely and not in-person as ordered by the state, its chair, Alexa Weitzman, wrote to elected officials on Monday. Screenshot via Queens CB6
By Jacob Kaye
Queens Community Board 6 will not host in-person meetings when they return from summer break despite orders to do so, the board’s chair said in a letter addressed to the governor, mayor, borough president and a handful of other elected representatives Monday.
Written by Alexa Weitzman, the board’s chair, the letter says that in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19 and protect its members and members of the public, the community board will continue to host virtual meetings instead of in-person meetings.
In the past week, a little over 3 percent of the city’s COVID tests came back positive, an increase from the previous week, according to the city’s health department. The Delta variant has accounted for 72 percent of positive cases in the past month. Hospitalizations and deaths remain stable.
The letter comes a week after the expiration of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s executive order allowing for community boards and other agencies subject to the state’s Open Meetings Law to meet virtually.
“Community Board meetings fall under [Open Meetings Law] and are therefore now required to meet in person, effective immediately. As of the writing of this letter Queens is still in the throes of the COVID pandemic, with concerning and increasing Delta variant transmission,” Weitzman wrote.
“To require Community Boards to meet in person at this juncture is extremely problematic [and] antithetical to the accessibility standards Queens Community Board 6 strives for,” the letter continues. “This letter serves as notice that CB6, Queens, will continue to meet remotely until further notice.”
While he is unable to make any legislative change himself, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards supports the community board’s decision to continue to meet virtually.
“I support the Community Board’s wishes for an option to meet remotely,” Richards said in a statement to the Eagle. “Amid the rise of the Delta variant, it is more important than ever that we keep our public servants safe and a hybrid model at the very least is a good compromise.”
“I urge the State Legislature to revise the Open Meetings Law for the duration of the pandemic,” he added.
Weitzman said there’s no reason for her board to return to in-person meetings as the number of COVID cases rises in the city, especially when virtual meetings have worked out so well. She’s said she’s seen an increase in attendance and public participation.
“I think that there's kind of a disconnect between reinstating Open Meetings Law as it was in a pre-COVID world and catching up to what we know we can do successfully now,” Weitzman told the Eagle. “We've been doing these meetings really successfully for over a year and we know what's worked well for our community.”
The chair of the board, which represents Forest Hills and Rego Park, said that she’s heard from members that they’re hesitant to return to face-to-face meetings.
On Monday, Manhattan Community Board 2, which has had packed in-person meetings about the rezoning of SoHo/NoHo, announced that two people who had attended one of those meetings recently tested positive for COVID-19. Both had been vaccinated.
The board has since postponed all of its August meetings.
There’s also the issue of space – Weitzman said that the board’s current meeting space at a Queens Community House building at 80-02 80-02 Kew Gardens Rd., isn’t large enough to provide social distancing and other COVID-19 safety measures.
“The [city’s guidance for returning to work] was issued but the space where we met before, it didn't seem like that was going to be appropriate, considering how much space we needed per person,” Weitzman said.
Queens Community Board 7 is facing similar challenges.
While Eugene Kelty, the board’s chair, said they’ll resume meeting in-person at their next meeting, they’re still hunting down a space to do it in. They were formerly located at a nursing home in Flushing and cannot return in an effort to keep the vulnerable population who lives there safe.
Weitzman said that she’s unsure of the consequences of violating the state’s Open Meetings Law in this context but said under specific circumstances, she may call the board back for an in-person meeting to stay in compliance with the law.
“I'm just not prepared to have general board business have to be in-person when we're going to have the 50 of us,” she said. “If there's some sort of in-person meeting that has to happen, just to check a box...we'll take that into consideration when we have to.”
Neither the governor nor the mayor’s office responded to requests for comment for this story.
