Your community board provides a range of services vital to your community’s welfare, from overseeing essential municipal services, to ensuring that you have a voice in local decision-making, to serving as a place-based provider of constituent services, but each and every one of our city’s community boards is currently facing a budget cut of $35,000.

In response to this, join all five of New York’s borough presidents, all 59 of New York’s community boards, and community advocates of all stripes next Tuesday, June 9, at 11:00 a.m., on the steps of City Hall, to call on the City Council for the restoration of community board budgets for the coming fiscal year. (This rally has been organized by the Manhattan Borough President’s Office.)

Community boards are the public’s interface with New York City’s enormous and complex government, and they are also government agencies’ conduit to the public. Meaning, for example, that when the Department of Health needs to update a community on the spread of the H1N1 virus, it asks the community board for help with outreach.

Boards already suffer from underfunding, and cuts this deep mean that the public loses out the most: fewer resources will mean tough choices about how to prioritize the many demands made on community boards every day as they struggle to both perform City Charter-mandated responsibilities and attend to the growing needs of constituents.