Learn About Permanent Citizens’ Assemblies for New York City

  • Citizens' Assemblies ("CAs") are groups of randomly selected residents, similar to the process for jury duty, tasked with making a decision on a key public issue. Members are continuously chosen at random to reflect the city's demographics, ensuring a true cross-section of New Yorkers, not just a permanent ruling class with money, time, or political connections.

    The citizens selected hear from subject-matter experts, stakeholders, and community voices on the topic at hand, then deliberate together before voting on recommendations or determinations that carry formal weight before City Council review. Assemblies are structured, facilitated, and bound to policy and legal frameworks. The process replaces political theatre with informed, collaborative decision-making, shifting us from ideological- or team-based decisions to policy-focused decisions: getting to the heart of effective governance.

    1. Random Selection: Names are randomly drawn from the voter roll (what's called sortition) and other civic databases, ensuring diversity by age, borough, background, and experience. The result would be an honest sample of the population. NYC could guarantee paid time off for Citizens' Assembly service by passing a City Charter amendment or local law that treats it like jury duty to protect jobs, benefits, and wages, with possible city reimbursement for small businesses.

    2. Briefing: Members learn about the issue from a wide range of perspectives: experts, advocates, affected communities, and industry voices, much like a jury does for a case.

    3. Deliberation: In moderated discussions, members weigh trade-offs, question presenters, and explore solutions. Members become genuinely informed on the policy and its implications before voting. The shift from ideology to policy is paramount.

    4. Decision: The assembly votes on determinations that carry formal weight before City Council review, within the scope defined by the City Charter.

    5. Rotation: Members serve short terms, rotating like juries, keeping power distributed.

  • When a small pool of career politicians and lobbyists hold power, decisions get stalled, diluted, or traded for favors. Citizens’ Assemblies replace this bottleneck with a diverse group of everyday New Yorkers who are randomly selected and independent of campaign donations. They rotate in and out. By focusing on evidence, not party lines, they break the deadlock and remove the financial incentives that fuel corruption.

    This is political transformation from the root, not a band-aid.

  • New York City faces a unique governance challenge that traditional electoral politics struggles to handle.

    1. Extreme fragmentation of authority: Dozens of boards and agencies influence decisions, but responsibility is diffuse, slowing action and blurring accountability.

    2. Gridlock despite broad agreement: On issues like housing and transit, New Yorkers often agree on the problem but lack a legitimate, authoritative process to move from agreement to action.

    3. Low-information, personality-driven politics: Local elections reward name recognition, fundraising, and party signaling more than informed deliberation on complex, non-partisan policy.

    4. Money-driven incentives: Campaign finance and lobbying skew priorities toward organized interests rather than evidence and public need.

    5. Political patronage over representation: Community Board members are appointed by Borough Presidents, politicians choosing who participates in local governance, not residents. Meanwhile, the five Borough Presidents collectively spend $32.1M annually operating what amount to mini-governments with no legislative or executive authority.

    6. Distance between people and power: Most residents have no meaningful role in shaping decisions that directly affect daily life, weakening trust and legitimacy.

    Citizens’ Assemblies directly address these conditions by consolidating deliberation, rotating representation through sortition, grounding decisions in evidence, and clearly locating authority, making NYC capable of acting on the problems it already knows it must solve.

  • New York City's local governance is fragmented across dozens of overlapping boards, agencies, and offices, most of which are advisory, unelected, and lack binding authority. This structure creates delay, redundancy, and capture by narrow interests, even when there is broad public agreement on what needs to be done.

    We propose consolidating NYC's existing advisory and deliberative bodies into a single, permanent, citizen-led decision process with formal standing in local decision-making, using lottery-based (sortition) membership. We do not advocate for using Citizens’ Assemblies elsewhere.

    Specifically, this plan consolidates:

    • 59 Community Boards
      Currently advisory-only, unelected, and without binding power.

    • 5 Borough Boards
      Largely duplicative of Community Boards and Borough Presidents, adding delay without clear authority.

    • 5 Borough Presidents
      Borough Presidents and Borough Boards are fully absorbed into the Assembly structure. Their $32.1M in combined annual spending, currently funding offices with no legislative or executive authority that also control who sits on Community Boards, is redirected into permanent, lottery-selected citizen governance.

    • Civic Engagement Commission (CEC) + The People’s Money
      Programs that already resemble Citizens’ Assemblies, but lack permanence and binding authority. Their functions are preserved and strengthened by placing them within a permanent Assembly framework.

    • City Planning Commission (CPC) – deliberative overlap only
      The CPC’s technical planning role remains essential. However, core public deliberation on land use and local impacts shifts to Citizens’ Assemblies, allowing the CPC to focus on coordination, standards, and long-term planning rather than duplicative review.

    The result:

    • A single, authoritative Citizens’ Assembly process at the local level

    • Randomly selected residents, rotated regularly, representing the city as it actually is

    • Formal decision-making standing within defined local domains

    • Fewer layers, clearer responsibility, and faster timelines for housing, schools, and infrastructure

    This restructuring reduces red tape, eliminates redundant overhead, and replaces fragmented bureaucracy with clear, citizen-led governance.

  • In our current system, debates often devolve into identity and political team lines rather than solving actual problems. Citizens' Assemblies shift the focus to shared facts, policy, and practical solutions. By working in small, diverse groups of citizens — not career politicians — with equal voice, members hear various perspectives, find common ground, and arrive at decisions that address the community's actual needs.

  • We’re looking ahead and as AI continues to evolve and shapes more of our culture and society, and with the backdrop of an unengaged political body, we risk drifting into technocracy, where algorithms and experts, rather than citizens, set policy. Embedding Citizens’ Assemblies into our governance now ensures that human values, equal representation, and democracy remain at the center of decision-making and a safeguarding structure is in place for the fast-changing future.

  • Ancient Athens used this random selection practice (called sortition) to fill most public offices, ensuring decisions reflected the whole citizenry, not a permanent ruling class. Citizens’ Assemblies bring that democratic principle into the 21st century, using modern facilitation methods and transparency tools.

    The pursuit of true democracy and the freedom it promises is still an ongoing project in America, yet it remains deeply embedded in our national foundation.

  • No new spending; instead: money back to the city.

    Funding Citizens’ Assemblies doesn’t require raising revenue or adding new taxes. We can reallocate from within the existing budget by consolidating duplicative and redundant agencies, boards, and positions into a single permanent Citizens’ Assembly with real authority and a rotating citizen body.

    The five Borough Presidents maintain full offices with staff, communications directors, policy advisors, and community liaisons, totaling millions annually, despite holding no legislative or executive governing authority. They also control who sits on Community Boards, making the current system both costly and undemocratic by design.

    The People’s Money fund and the Civic Engagement Commission have laid important and meaningful groundwork by incorporating representative participation in city budgeting. It shows NYC’s willingness to experiment with these changes. The program, however, is short-term, duplicative (overlaps with existing Community Boards), not a true sortition or lottery system, and advisory only.

    These structural changes and reallocations would require a City Charter update.

  • Assembly authority would be defined and bounded by a City Charter update, the same mechanism that governs Community Boards today. Within that framework, assembly determinations would function as a mandatory first layer of review before City Council acts on defined local matters. City Council retains full legislative authority and final accountability.

    This is not a proposal to give unelected bodies unchecked power. It is a proposal to replace a politically appointed, purely advisory process with one chosen through sortition, with formal standing rather than no standing at all.

    The exact scope within defined local domains would evolve through the Charter process itself, which is precisely how a framework built to strengthen democratic structures should work.

    1. Democratic Capacity, Not Just Participation
      Permanent Citizens’ Assemblies place everyday New Yorkers directly into structured decision-making roles. Democracy becomes continuous, representative, and grounded in the realities of city life, not limited to elections or advisory input.

    2. Policy-Centered Governance
      Assemblies shift decision-making away from personality and political theater toward informed deliberation on concrete city issues like housing, transportation, education, budgeting, and infrastructure.

    3. Efficiency & Cost Clarity
      By consolidating fragmented boards and commissions, Citizens’ Assemblies streamline approvals, shorten timelines, especially for housing, and improve how public resources are used.

    4. Structural Corruption Prevention
      Random selection removes dependence on campaigns, fundraising, and patronage. Integrity is strengthened by design, not enforcement alone.

    5. Informed Public Judgment
      Assemblies receive briefings from experts, agencies, and stakeholders, grounding decisions in evidence and diverse perspectives rather than partisan alignment.

    6. Safeguard Against Technocratic Drift
      As governance becomes more complex, a structure for Citizens’ Assemblies ensure that human deliberation remains central to public decision-making in New York City.

    7. Restored Public Trust
      Transparent, peer-led deliberation rebuilds confidence by bringing decision-making closer to the people most affected by it.