Post 31: Revitalization, second restructuring and the role of CB3 and its chair

As always, with the exception of public figures, I use altered names to protect the individuals in this history.

Margaret Fung, whom I cannot praise enough for her work, emailed me some six months or so after the CWG meeting pause, asking whether I could put together a CWG meeting. Although I did not have the entire CWG mailing list, I did have all the active members' email addresses and then some. All we needed was a place to meet. Margaret volunteered AALDEF's offices, no space for a large meeting, but sufficient for a first meeting. And so CWG continued. 

Among the attendees was Gigi, then the chair of CB3. Unlike CB1 and CB2, CB3 had never resigned from CWG and continued to attend meetings. We held two or three regular monthly meetings at AALDEF until one of the Seward Park high schools joined the group and volunteered a classroom for meetings. Later on we met at Project Reach on Eldridge Street. 

When Jaime was elected to replace Gigi as CB3 chair, some of us met with him to explain the status of the plan, inform him that CB3 had voted to adopt the plan, and that we wanted continued participation and support from CB3. Jaime promised us to promote the plan and attend the next CWG meeting to learn more about the group. He attended the meeting and there reiterated his support. 

At the following meeting of CB3's Executive Committee, I attended in the audience. To my surprise, Gigi, still a CB member, and MyPhuong, the Land Use Committee chair, explained that the CWG plan was no longer an item for discussion. When asked why, Gigi and MyPhuong divulged the fact that they, without notifying anyone -- not the Land Use Committee, not the CB, not even the new chair and certainly not CWG -- had resigned from CWG. And not only resigned without any vote from the CB, but had resigned several months prior, in other words while Gigi had been attending CWG. 

I have in the past and prior to this information, publicly defended Gigi in Bowery Boogie, a local online newspaper, when I thought she was under unfair attack, an attack that seemed to me implicitly sexist and racist, although I have never supported her political views. And I have come to expect a certain level of duplicity in community affairs. But this really was beyond what I'd ever seen. To make a decision on the part of a deliberative body without their deliberation or vote, and without notifying that deliberative body and not inform the group impacted by the decision, and to attend its meetings as if there were no change -- this struck me as a basic misunderstanding or lack of understanding of the meaning of process, transparency and accountability, and the purpose of process, transparency and accountability, and the responsibility of officers to protect process, transparency and accountability. Gigi went on to campaign for the office of councilmember.