Bronx Community Board 11 voted to boot Chair Bernadette Ferrara and Vice Chair Al D’Angelo from their leadership positions Thursday night — in a meeting that involved arguments between board members, disruptions from the gallery, and a resignation on the spot.
A motion to let Ferrara and D’Angelo carry out their terms as chair and vice chair failed by a vote of 15-22, with three abstentions, during CB11’s full board meeting on April 25, even after the body’s investigative committee recommended the full board let them remain in their leadership positions. They also took a second vote to certify the move.
Ferrara’s removal initiative came primarily from critics who claim she neglected her board duties while campaigning for the CD-13 council seat against Marjorie Velázquez in the June 2023 local primary — which she went on to lose.
D’Angelo faced intense scrutiny for separate reasons. An article published by The City last fall highlighted the column D’Angelo penned in the Bronx Times in April 2023, where he questioned why “Black Americans are the least educated, least healthy and among the most incarcerated ethnic group in the country” and stated that it was time to start addressing the “elephant in the room.” His critics have called his character into question, accusing him of spreading racist stereotypes they don’t want to be affiliated with.
According to CB11 records obtained by the Bronx Times, D’Angelo was also facing leadership removal for reasons other than his column — including “offending the laws” of the body and absenteeism.
The vote on April 25 began calmly, with members of the investigative committee explaining their recommendation to let the pair finish their terms as chair and vice chair. Eliezer Rodriguez, CB11 board member and chair of the investigative committee, said before the vote that the group met at length three separate times for a total of around nine hours to discuss both Ferrara’s and D’Angelo’s fitness for their positions.
Before the vote, he urged the full board to take the committee’s recommendation and let the pair finish their terms.
“It will affect, perhaps, if it’s a negative outcome, the standing of these individuals within their communities,” Rodriguez said.
But the meeting turned more chaotic after the vote to strip them of their titles, when D’Angelo doubled down on opinions he voiced in his Bronx Times column with what he claimed were statistics about single-parent households, crime, poverty, and school drop-out rates in Black communities written by former President Barack Obama.
“That was written by President Obama,” D’Angelo said after his monologue. “I guess maybe he should have been removed from office.”
Board member Malcom Gray and District Manager Jeremy Warneke struggled to regain decorum in the crowd after D’Angelo’s statements, asking two members of the public to separate themselves or they’d have to call security.
Also during the commotion, board member Phyllis Nastasio came into the camera frame and dropped a piece of paper in front of Warneke, a microphone barely catching her telling him “my letter of resignation.” Warneke confirmed with the Bronx Times that Nastasio — who is involved with Bronx politics and has run for state Assembly and City Council — did in fact resign from CB11 on April 25, and that at least one other member he’s aware of has threatened to do the same.
Nastasio told the Bronx Times via email that while her resignation was “well thought out, not spur of the moment,” the meeting last week was her “last straw.” She attributed the board’s dysfunction to a group of members, “Malcom [Gray] and his squad,” saying “it’s their way or no way.”
“Every meeting is fraught with arguments and disrespect, as you can clearly see since every meeting is recorded. I pride myself on being able to work with everyone, but this group is impossible to work with,” she said. “I will continue to advocate for my community as a citizen of this district. I can accomplish more this way than as a CB member.”
Without Nastasio’s resignation the outcome of the second vote to certify Ferrara’s chair title removal might have yielded different results. At the start of the meeting there were 42 members, meaning a 22-vote majority was needed to pass a motion. After Nastasio’s middle-of-meeting resignation, however, that brought the voting members down to 41 for the certification — which required a 21-vote majority to pass. The motion to certify her leadership removal passed with 21 votes.
After things settled during the meeting and before moving on to the next agenda item, Gray denounced D’Angelo’s rhetoric both in his previously published column and after the night’s vote.
“You can write all the articles you want, you can have your beliefs about my community as you want,” Gray said. “But you will never walk this Earth with my skin. You will never understand the difficulty that I’ve had toward people who thought like that.”
In a statement posted to social media on April 25, Ferrara said her removal was “all about [manipulation,] power and taking over the community board, starting with public defamation of character.”
Both Ferrara’s and D’Angelo’s unprecedented removals have been brewing for months.
The first sign of the shakeup came in November 2023, when the board voted in executive session to create a committee to potentially strip Ferrara and D’Angelo of their leadership positions. That month, Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson attended a Bronx CB11 meeting to express her disappointment about how the board was operating, saying she was frustrated by the body’s “chaos” and “dysfunction.”
On April 29, Gibson said she was “deeply disappointed” by the actions of CB11 last week, pledging to “help to restore order and civility” to the body.
“It is clear now that Community Board 11 requires intervention. A very small, but persistent group has for too long reliably distracted and embarrassed the greater board,” Gibson said in a statement. “Moreover, even though a change in leadership was assured, some members moved forward with the removal process solely to embarrass these board officers. This is an unacceptable way to treat longtime community leaders.”
The BP said she’s currently deliberating reappointments for CB11 leadership, as well as applications for new members.
In her statement about the removal, Ferrara accused people in her removal committee of having “an agenda.”
“The mature decision should have been to wait until election time in June 2024, nominate and vote instead of dragging so many volunteers through the mud,” Ferrara said.
D’Angelo called the vote a “travesty,” during the meeting, and said he believed it was “a done deal from the get-go.”
CB 11 serves the neighborhoods of Allerton, Indian Village, Morris Park, Pelham Gardens, Pelham Parkway and Van Nest.
This story was last updated on May 1 at 5 p.m. Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly included a photo with a caption denoting Phyllis Nastasio. Another photo misspelled Malcom Gray’s first name.
Reach Camille Botello at cbotello@schnepsmedia.com. For more coverage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @bronxtimes
