We were pleased to learn at a recent meeting of Community Board 7, that the Board is planning to create a Web site this year.

As Long Term Planning Committee chair Paul Foster said at the meeting, “It’s impossible to be a community board [in the 21st century] without a Web site.”

Community boards were officially formed in 1975 (following other experiments like Mayor John Lindsay’s Little City Halls) to give residents a voice on local issues. In a city of eight million where City Hall is close to an hour subway ride from the northwest Bronx, it’s critical for there to be more local centers of government information and access.

The boards have several important functions, including being the first stop in the city’s land-use review process, developing the community’s budget priorities, and working with city agencies to address problem areas.

Despite these critical tasks, too few people know about the Community Board or how to use it as a tool for community improvement. The Board’s new Web site will serve as an entry point for people, who will be able to learn about the Board’s workings, its committee meetings, and current issues, all just a click away.

We surfed the Net a little and, without too much effort, found some great examples of good community board Web sites all over the city with features that CB7 may want to copy or improve upon as it develops its own.

Our neighbors at Community Board 8 (bronxcb8.org) post a calendar of committee meetings on their site, along with the status of various rezoning efforts and the minutes of all general board and committee meeting minutes going back a couple of years. You can also file a complaint electronically. Board 2 in Hunts Point has similar features, as do virtually all the boards in Manhattan. Board 4 in Manhattan distributes board news and information by zip code to residents who register on the site. Board 5 (cb5.org) has a listing of committee meeting dates and details two months in advance. That board also has a prodigious list of community resources such as senior programs, mental health services and food programs. One particularly innovative and interactive board Web site in Queens (cb3qn.nyc.gov) features discussion forums for community residents and a storehouse of board documents, like development proposals and permit applications.

We congratulate community Board 7 for embarking on this important project and we are certain it will attract more people to getting involved in their community.

Member Item Series

In this issue, we begin a multi-part series exploring the role of our state legislators in distributing your taxpayer money in the form of “member items.”

The amount of this money that your elected representatives allocate to local community groups has long been kept under dark cover – unless a particular politician felt like disclosing the details to his constituents (most did not).

It wasn’t until this year, following a gathering drumbeat from editorial boards and good government groups — and more recently a lawsuit from the Albany Times Union and the indictment of local State Senator Efrain Gonzalez for allegedly stealing member item money — that the information began to see the light of day.

We do not oppose member items themselves. In most cases, a local elected official is more in tune with what groups deserve and need public funding than someone working at a state agency almost 200 miles away in Albany. But by mostly keeping the details under wraps, New Yorkers have been unable to see if their communities have been given a fair and equal shake under this system. Now that the veil has been lifted a little, it’s quite clear that there are gaping disparities in what various legislators bring home to their districts each year.

In the next issue, we’ll take a look at how our communities have fared under this system.think!