The Community Board 11 Ethics and Disciplinary Committee is backing a complaint against the full board over a raucous September public hearing about the “Just Home” proposal to house formerly incarcerated individuals in the district.
The complaint was submitted by Diana Finch, a CB11 constituent, on Oct. 5, 2022, but the ethics committee didn’t hear it until April 24. Finch told the Bronx Times that the committee felt like the community board’s procedures needed to be reviewed before considering her complaint, causing the delay.
Finch said in her complaint — which was obtained by the Bronx Times — that since the board didn’t enforce or follow its code of conduct at its Sept. 29 public hearing, there was “a confrontational atmosphere of threat and violence, further dividing the community the Board serves, and fostering misinformation about the Just Home project.”
The Just Home proposal — which still needs to be voted on by the NYC Health and Hospitals Board and the New York City Council — would convert a vacant building on the Jacobi campus in Morris Park to house homeless individuals with medical needs released from Rikers. The project would be operated by the nonprofit Fortune Society.
The board’s Sept. 29 hearing was largely a free for all, in which those who tried to speak in support of the proposal were heckled and shouted down. Jacobi police officers were called on-site, but no one was removed from the event.
Since agitators were never asked to leave, attendees’ behavior was allowed to get worse, argued Finch, who faced roaring screams when she tried to express her support for the proposal. She also said that while people who supported Just Home were held to 2-minute time limits to speak, people against it were allowed additional time.
“The hearing seemed engineered by the Board to sharply divide the community — for Just Home vs against — and bolster the impression that those against are in the overwhelming majority because they were allowed to literally drown out the supportive statements, some of which were made on behalf not of individuals but of large segments of the community — such as homeless individuals, those seeking affordable housing, those struggling with medical issues to re-enter society,” Finch said in her complaint.
Finch told the ethics committee on April 24 that a Jacobi police officer who insisted on accompanying her and fellow project supporter Michael Kaess out to Pelham Parkway after the September hearing told her that “the only way to control a crowd is to stop the bad behavior at the very first outburst.”
Finch requested that the board apologizes to everyone who spoke in support of the proposal and gives speakers who were drowned out another opportunity to testify. She also asked that the board consider refraining from voting on the proposal because “their entire review process has been so contaminated by allowed misconduct” — a point now moot since the board already voted against the project.
The committee didn’t support Finch’s complaint off the bat. At the CB11 full board meeting Thursday night, Ethics and Disciplinary Committee Chair Naomi Pemberton announced that the committee’s four members were split on whether they support Finch’s complaint, but three members agreed the board should write an apology.
On Tuesday, Pemberton notified Finch that the committee’s vote had been updated to support her complaint. Jeanette Wilson, a CB11 member who was just appointed to the committee on April 27, was allowed to retroactively vote, which broke the tie.
Pemberton did not respond to questions from the Bronx Times on Tuesday.
The board’s Leadership Committee, which next meets on May 18, will decide whether they agree that the board should apologize.
The tone of the September public hearing was no surprise, as unruly residents similarly shouted out their objections a couple of months earlier at a July 2022 Morris Park Community Association meeting. The community association is led by Al D’Angelo, the CB11 vice chair, who also sits on the Jacobi Medical Center advisory board but has been adamantly against the project.
In Finch’s complaint, she accused D’Angelo — who was acting chair at the time of the September hearing — of not enforcing the board’s code of conduct or maintaining control of the meeting, and new CB11 Chair Bernadette Ferrara — who was the Education Committee chair at the time — of participating in yelling at a speaker in support of the project.
At the ethics committee meeting, Finch called D’Angelo “the person of greatest authority present” during the September public hearing and said he failed to intervene at the first outburst from the audience, as well as when Fortune Society critic Roderick Compass riled up the crowd, speaking for more than 15 minutes. In her complaint, Finch said that D’Angelo shouldn’t be allowed to run any more public hearings.
But D’Angelo’s defense was that the crowd was uncontrollable — therefore, stopping Compass would have resulted in a “riot” — and that it wasn’t his meeting to run.
He claimed that even though he was introduced as the CB11 vice chair and acting chair at the start of the hearing, he wasn’t attending in his role as a board leader. Rather, he was there “strictly” to represent the community association, he said.
“As far as I’m concerned, I did the best I could under the circumstances,” D’Angelo said on April 24. “You are right. The crowd was unruly and it was out of control. The venue was too big. We should have learned from what happened at (the community association meeting at) Maestro’s. I thought possibly the crowd would be different. … No one was listening, there was not enough police there to quell the crowd.”
D’Angelo also testified at the September hearing, calling on electeds to pull funding from the city’s public hospital system over the proposal.
Ferrara, who was elected CB11 chair in January, disputed Finch’s accusation that she joined in the crowd’s uproar and said she simply “gave a visual thumbs down” in response to a speaker’s opinion. She said Finch then “reprimanded” her and she felt like she was “back in grammar school with Mother Superior.”
“I said please don’t speak to me in that tone of voice,” Ferrara said. “My son doesn’t even speak to me in that tone of voice.”
In footage of the hearing reviewed by the Bronx Times, Ferrara points toward a speaker in support of the project and says something inaudible on the video from her second-row seat as attendees argue over letting the woman speak. As the speaker leaves the podium, Ferrara gestures at her before Finch turns around from the first row and the two have a tense exchange.
Ferrara said at the ethics committee meeting that she didn’t step up to help run the September public hearing because she was attending as a member of the public, not in her capacity as a board member, in order to testify against the project.
Still, Ferrara said that she didn’t think the September hearing should have been held in the first place because of the environment at the community association meeting a few months prior.
“My opinion was that it should never have happened because it was just going to be bringing the same crowd of people with the same opinions that were easily going to be escalated,” Ferrara said. ” … that’s just my opinion about having it at the (Jacobi) rotunda.”
Reach Aliya Schneider at aschneider@schnepsmedia.com or (718) 260-4597. For more coverage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @bronxtimes
