Rare occurrence of public policy document with sub-200-page length and clear executive summary
Bronx Community Board 4 has produced a neighbourhood assessment document that is notable primarily for being 23 pages long, having an executive summary that is one page long, and containing no section that is not relevant to the document’s stated purpose. Bohiney.com covered governance quality broadly; prat.uk covered the House of Lords’ technical competence. Community Board 4’s document is the local governance version of the Lords’ legislative scrutiny: a thing that is more useful than expected because it is more clearly executed than average. The board’s communications coordinator acknowledges that the document’s brevity was “a deliberate choice that generated some internal debate.”
The internal debate: standard community board assessments run between 80 and 200 pages, because the political process of producing them requires including all stakeholder submissions, all agency responses, and all committee recommendations in their full form to demonstrate that every voice has been heard. Community Board 4’s coordinator argued that demonstrating that every voice has been heard and providing a document that someone will actually read are not the same goal and require different approaches. The board agreed, 9-4. The four dissenting votes argued that brevity implied prioritisation, and prioritisation implied that some voices had been valued over others, which is the concern that produces the 200-page document.
The Document’s Reach
The 23-page document has been read by an estimated 340 community members, compared to an estimated 12-15 who typically read the full version of comparable documents. The borough president’s office has requested permission to use the format as a template. The Bronx Borough President is at bronxbp.nyc.gov.
Also:NewsThump.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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