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 binding policies. Assemblies are structured, facilitated, and bound to policy and legal frameworks. The process replaces political theatre with informed, collaborative decision-making, and shifts us from ideological- or team-based decisions to policy-focused decisions: getting to the heart of effective governance.

New York City faces a unique combination of scale, density, and fragmentation that makes effective governance especially difficult:

• Extreme fragmentation of authority
  Dozens of boards, agencies, and offices influence decisions without clear responsibility, slowing action on housing, infrastructure, and long-term planning.

• Gridlock despite broad agreement
  NYC locals often agree on what needs to be done but lacks a clear, authoritative process to move from identifying the problems to problem solving.

• Low-information, personality-driven politics
  Elections reward name recognition, media narratives at the national level, party alignment, and fundraising rather than informed deliberation on complex city policy. Most local issues and policies are nonpartisan in nature.

• Money-driven incentives
  Campaign finance and lobbying distort priorities, favoring those with access and resources over evidence and public need.

• Distance between people and power
  Most residents have no meaningful way to deliberate on decisions that shape daily life, weakening trust and accountability.

Citizens’ Assemblies directly address these conditions by consolidating deliberation, clarifying authority, rotating representation, and grounding decisions in evidence and public values, making NYC better able to act on the problems it already knows it must solve.

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 sharing their perspectives before deliberation, again, much like a jury does for a case.

3. Deliberation: In moderated discussions, members weigh trade-offs, question presenters, and explore solutions. Voters become truly informed on the individual policy and its implications in which they are voting on. The shift from ideology to policy is paramount.

4. Decision: The assembly votes on recommendations or binding decisions, depending on the 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.

In our current system, debates often devolve into identity and political team lines rather than solving actual problems. The current system reduces the human experience and the political will of a nation, by preventing complexity. Citizens’ Assemblies shift the focus to shared facts, a policy-focus, 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 vote on policies that address everyone’s 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 Taxes: Just Smarter Spending!

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 the single permanent Citizens’ Assemblies. The result: more effective democracy, less bureaucracy, faster and more efficient decision-making on much-needed issues like housing, and significant long-term savings.

• $5 million from the People’s Money fund, a Citizens’ Assemblies-like experiment,

• $20.4 million from Community Boards,

• $37.2 million from the 5 Borough Presidents,

• $597,000 from the Borough Boards,

• and $24.6 million from the City Planning Commission.

The People’s Money fund and the Civic Engagement Commission have laid important 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), and advisory only, rather than permanent and with real decision-making authority. This participatory budgeting program already allocates hundreds of millions annually under the Mayor’s unilateral control, and its budget can be expanded for this purpose.

NYC’s many fragmented, overlapping agencies are slow, disconnected, and easily captured by local power brokers, while adding significant administrative delay, financial burdens, and inefficiencies. For example, we are in a mass housing crisis but the process for developers to be approved to build new housing supply touches several overlapping agencies with redundant requirements that make the approval process a multi-year one.

This is why our plan advocates to start here. In our restructuring, we propose merging redundant city agencies and positions into a single, permanent Citizens’ Assembly process, consolidating:

• 59 Community Boards: advisory only, unelected, with no binding power or authority.

• 5 Borough Boards: overlap with both community boards and borough presidents, adding an unnecessary layer of redundancy.

• 5 Borough Presidents: offices with duplicative staff and sizable budgets, despite holding little executive authority.

• Civic Engagement Commission (CEC) and The People’s Money fund: currently operating in a Citizens’ Assembly–like manner, but duplicative and without binding power. By consolidating them into a permanent Citizens’ Assembly, their meaningful functions gain real power.

• City Planning Commission (CPC): duplicates land-use review already done by community boards, borough presidents, borough boards, and ultimately City Council, the Mayor, and sometimes the Board of Standards & Appeals; it functions as an unnecessary intermediary in an already crowded process.

Restructuring would cut red tape, eliminate millions in overhead, and speed up timelines for critical projects like housing and education by replacing fragmented bureaucracies with a single, citizen-led approval process.

1. Democratic Capacity, Not Just Participation
   Permanent Citizens’ Assemblies expand who governs New York City by placing everyday residents directly into structured, decision-making roles. Democracy in NYC becomes more representative, continuous, and grounded in local realities.

2. Policy-Centered Governance
   Citizens’ Assemblies shift public decision-making away from personality-driven politics and toward informed deliberation on concrete policies — housing, transportation, education, budgeting, and public infrastructure.

3. Efficiency & Cost Clarity
   A single, authoritative civic structure reduces fragmentation across boards, commissions, and overlapping agencies. This streamlines approvals, shortens timelines, especially for housing, and improves how public resources are used.

4. Structural Corruption Prevention
   By removing dependence on campaigns, fundraising, and political patronage, Citizens’ Assemblies reduce incentives for influence-peddling and favoritism. Integrity is strengthened through design, not enforcement alone.

5. Informed Voters & Public Judgment
   Assemblies receive briefings from experts, agencies, and stakeholders, ensuring decisions are grounded in evidence and diverse perspectives. Civic judgment becomes informed by default, rather than filtered through partisan alignment.

6. Safeguard Against Technocratic Drift
   As governance becomes more complex, including the growing use and capabilities of AI and technology, 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 in public institutions by bringing decision-making closer to the people most affected by it.