New York City Department of City Planning

And that both the city and the community would really prefer someone else have, right? We don't have the funds to mow the grass and keep up the thing when We don't want it and they don't want us to have it.

DCAS also and the Department of City Planning raised to us sort of another issue, which is air rights over landmarks.

You know, city owned landmarks are sometimes shorter than the area they are zoned for.

So you've got, for example, we heard from the FDNY, like a two story firehouse that's in an area zoned for five stories.

You're just going to city agencies.

And the question here is, should you have to go to a bunch of different city agencies and try to figure out the bureaucracy on your own? Or should the onus of navigating the bureaucracy be on the government? And does the government need to come to you? And so that was the sort of fundamental change that we're contemplating in question for.

And I will say there are people at the Department of City Planning who study your question and others in city government.

I don't think it was quite the scope of this charter commission, but we need to come to other questions.

We also have the county executives from Nassau and Suffolk, Westchester and Rockland.

And we have the MTA, New York City DOT, and the Department of City Planning for New York City.

And so we bring those member agencies together to plan to talk about what the immediate needs are on the roads, on the bridges, in the transit network, in pedestrian needs, in bicycle needs, in freight, which is a very important topic that often gets kind of overlooked but is, of course, important to us and important to the state DOT.

Really just making sure that we have about 13 million people that live in the NMTEC region, millions more that travel through it.

In New York City alone, the five-year American Community Survey counts nearly 49,500 residents of Honduran descent.

The Department of City Planning reveals that 29,314 foreign-born Hondurans lived in the city in 2023, a 17% increase over the previous decade.

These numbers demonstrate growth, but here is the critical problem.

None of these official da- data sets tell us how many of those individuals are Garifuna.