Election aims to fill Roxbury Neighborhood Council board

Louis Elisa was among attendees who spoke at Reclaim Roxbury’s meeting. The event focused on selecting candidates to serve on the board of the reinstated neighborhood council.

Members of Reclaim Roxbury gathered at Roxbury Community College last week to push forward a full revival of the Roxbury Neighborhood Council. At the end of the Thursday night meeting, attendees voted by show of hand for 18 candidates to sit for brief terms on RNC’s board.

“This is about control, this is about power, this is about governance,” said City Councilor Tito Jackson, who launched Reclaim Roxbury. He stated that a neighborhood council is necessary to give Roxbury — and not the BRA — control over its development.

According to Jackson, new RNC members will serve for three months — a timeframe chosen to match the Boston Redevelopment Authority’s pause on its own planning effort in the area, PLAN Dudley. Presenters said the neighborhood council is expected to revise its bylaws and prepare for an election to be held at the end of those three months to bring on members for longer terms.

However, Reclaim Roxbury members’ plans are contingent on approval by another group. In December of 2015, former RNC member Bob Terrell filed to reinstate the long-defunct neighborhood council, an initiative he began independent of Reclaim Roxbury. The revived RNC has a five-member board, comprising Terrell, Bridgette Wallace, Pat Riddick, Bette Toney and Rhoda Johnson.

After Jackson started Reclaim Roxbury, Terrell offered the group the opportunity to fill the supermajority of RNC’s seats, joining the five current board members. Those elected on Thursday will have to be ratified by the five existing board members for it to be official, Terrell told the Banner. And current bylaws would have to be revised to allow for an election to be held in three months or for more than 12 of the elected candidates to be seated on the council.

Neighborhood council need

Presenters at last week’s meeting pointed to a neighborhood council as a way to bring community influence into development and planning decisions and monitor the development process to ensure any agreements are enforced.

Former City Councilor Chuck Turner said a neighborhood council offers community representation and power in a way the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan Oversight Committee cannot.

“We haven’t had a neighborhood council to balance the authority of the community against the authority of the Master Plan Oversight Committee that is essentially under control of BRA,” Turner said at the meeting, speaking before the election. “I’m not saying they haven’t been vigilant in fighting for community interests, but the reality is they are set up by the mayor.”

While the mayor appoints RSMPOC’s members, the Roxbury Neighborhood Council traditionally was elected by other Roxbury residents already serving on the RNC.

A neighborhood council also could take advantage of several already-existing powers. For one, the former RNC had say in RSMPOC membership. According to the committee’s website, the mayor appoints RSMPOC from a pool of candidates nominated by the RNC and Roxbury elected officials.

A neighborhood council advises the city on projects in its area. Under the BRA’s article 50, the agency must inform the RNC (or any successor organization) of plans and proposals for the disposition of publicly-owned land or zoning relief and allow the RNC 30 days in which to submit recommendations. Article 80 obligates the BRA to inform neighborhood councils of public comment periods and BRA board meetings on reviews of large and small projects.

Jackson pointed out that the RSMPOC was established for a different purpose than the RNC. The RSMPOC was to oversee the development of only eight specific parcels, whereas a neighborhood council is designed to speak on planning, zoning and development in the entire neighborhood. And there are hundreds of sites for development in the Roxbury, Turner added.

“[The RSMPOC] was not set up to do what they’re doing currently,” Jackson said. “They were set up as a taskforce.”

In February, city officials announced that the RSMPOC’s purview in the Dudley Square area would expand to include large privately-held parcels and parcels held by the Department of Neighborhood Development.

Work to be done

Jackson and Regina McClay, the co-chair of Reclaim Roxbury’s Governance and Decision-making Structure Committee, said at the meeting that the current RNC bylaws need revamping. Among the needed changes: distributing power more equally among members, McClay said, and removing provisions, such as a requirement to pay to be a member, Jackson said.

And the current RNC is similarly interested in restructuring, Terrell, who was not in attendance, told the Banner. He said the Reclaim Roxbury’s group has produced some valuable suggestions, and that the RNC particularly is interested in acquiring greater influence in development processes.

“We don’t want to completely replicate what the council did before,” Terrell said. “The neighborhood councils throughout the city have been advisory and that’s not what we want to do. We really want to have more authority and standing.”

Several Reclaim Roxbury members noted that residents have the freedom to reinvent the council to better meet today’s challenges and wants, or even create a new organization, outside of the RNC, to handle these issues.

“We can use this [council] as a mechanism and build out of it,” Mukaji Ambila, co-chair of the Organizing Strategy Committee, said. “If we get enough people, the Roxbury Neighborhood Council is not going to be enough.” Ambila said she expects residents to call for a larger and more powerful group, and that the three months are a chance to test out and revise the council’s workings.

But the council first must have full membership before it can be altered, according to Jackson, who urged attendees to elect council members that night.

“We have to have a populated Roxbury Neighborhood Council to be able to transact and do any business,” Jackson said. “For anything to count and for any of those changes that were brought forward in terms of the bylaws, you actually have to have a fully-populated neighborhood council.”

Contesting candidates

Several core members of Reclaim Roxbury expressed the assumption that the co-chairs of the planning group’s four committees, along with several members of the last RNC, would become the new council. This newly-elected council would revise bylaws and procedures, further community outreach and prepare for the election of the next RNC members, said Randall Foote, an RCC professor whose urban studies students have collaborated on Reclaim Roxbury.

But when Foote proposed the motion to elect those candidates, it met some opposition.

Former Senator Dianne Wilkerson asserted that a new neighborhood council members should be elected only from among those currently in the room — which disqualified all board members of the reinstated RNC other than Bridgette Wallace. Attendee David Mclean said this was the first meeting he had been able to make. He agreed with not electing absent members, saying he did not want anyone unknown to him to represent him.

“People who have been involved putting in effort should be involved in putting people on council but I also think the community who’s just finding out about this council should have the opportunity to be on the council,” Mclean added.

Attendees determined that candidates would have to either work or live in Roxbury, but did not require them to represent different districts or to have been involved in the community for a set minimum period of time. This runs up against current RNC bylaws, which, Terrell said, require candidates to have been Roxbury residents for a minimum of six months.

New RNC members

Ultimately, eight co-chairs along with ten other nominated or self-nominated attendees were voted for by meeting attendees. However, Terrell said not all of these members can join. Current bylaws allow for a 17-member RNC board; with five members already, including Wallace, there is room only for 12 more. In a May 3 email to Reclaim Roxbury, Terrell said the RNC’s agreement was to consider admitting Reclaim Roxbury’s eight co-chairs — should Reclaim Roxbury’s members vote in support of them and the co-chairs be Roxbury residents.

Many among the elected co-chairs identified themselves as organizers, and three said they live in Dorchester, but work or study in Roxbury. The elected co-chairs included Darnell Johnson, coordinator of Right to the City Boston; Armani White, Roxbury resident and organizer; Mukaji Ambila, Dorchester resident and organizer in Roxbury; Regina McClay, Roxbury resident who works in education; an RCC student who lives in Dorchester; a Dorchester resident who has been an organizer in Roxbury for six years; and a Roxbury resident who co-founded a Boston nonprofit focused on the prison industrial complex. Another co-chair elected was Bridgette Wallace, Roxbury resident and engagement manager of SkyLab, who is already a current RNC board member.

Those nominated and elected at the meeting included several with political backgrounds, such as Chuck Turner, Dianne Wilkerson and Seth Andrea McCoy, chief of staff for the state auditor. Several union members were elected as well. David Mclean is a union electrician from Fort Hill, and Francis is a retired former lab technician and a member of Local 285 and 1199 SEIU. Also elected: Paige Thompson, a Roxbury resident with a background in development.

Councilor Jackson’s office was unable to provide comment or names of the elected members by press deadline.

Meanwhile, the BRA questioned the use of the Reclaim Roxbury process to revive the RNC.

“There should be a broader conversation with city officials regarding the reestablishment of the Roxbury Neighborhood Council and its potential role in relation to existing advisory groups,” BRA Director of Communications Nick Martin said in a statement to the Banner. “However, in order to be successful we must take a collaborative approach that brings people together, and we encourage any community member invested in the future of Roxbury to lend their voice to PLAN Dudley Square.”