NYC's Community Board Budgets
They vary from $276k to $560k // FY 2025
New York City has 59 community districts, each of which is overseen by a 50-member community board. Unlike city council districts (and other legislative districts around the country) community districts are not regularly “reapportioned,” and they have wide variability in population—from a few ten thousand to a few hundred thousand.
📍Find your community district and community board here.
Below you will find a choropleth map that shows the different budgets allocated to each community board in the FY 2025 New York City expense budget, which you can read for yourself here; see pages 179E—296E for the community board budget allocations.
Hover over each community district to see its budget, as well as the estimated number of staff funded by that budget. Although much of the inter-community district budget variability can be traced to different levels of commercial rent and staffing, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is problematic spending that needs to be corrected too. Community boards can get themselves into sticky budget situations by not planning ahead, and not properly wrangling expenses.
💰 Monitor your community board’s spending live through Checkbook NYC, which is open-source!
Looking through Checkbook, an oddity I’ve noticed in the past is very different staffing approaches between community board offices. Based on payroll data, some community boards appear to have a single district manager, while others have a manager plus 3-5 lower-paid associates.