The Charter Revision Commission appointed by Mayor Adams on Thursday serves two purposes and both are laudable. The panel can be a necessary block should a City Council dominated Charter Revision Commission push something detrimental to city governance and secondly, the mayoral group can also alter the City Charter to streamline the creation of more desperately needed housing and end the Council’s noxious “member veto” over local housing projects.
As to the defensive nature, we had urged Adams to create a Charter Revision Commission because the Council passed a bill to create their panel, with nine of the 17 members appointed by the speaker. That legislation won by vote of 50-1 on Nov. 13 and took effect without a mayoral signature yesterday.
The Council already wants to have the power to confirm the mayor’s commissioners, weakening the mayor’s authority and ability to serve the public. Who knows what else a Charter commission under the Council’s sway would try that would be bad. Or maybe the group might come up with some useful changes to the City Charter.
Our thinking was that if the Council’s commission presented the voters something reasonable and worthwhile, the mayor’s commission could hold back and let the Council’s commission put their ideas on the ballot for voter approval.
However, if the new Council commission ended up pushing rotten ideas like getting rid of term limits, then the mayor’s commission could issue their own proposals, which would automatically supersede the Council’s measures from the ballot. Under that thinking, even the most innocuous Charter change would suffice, similar to the harmless proposals a mayoral commission successfully used this year to block the Council’s advice and consent move.
But Adams went one better, setting up a commission to focus on housing. When the current City Charter was adopted by the vote of the public in 1989, following the U.S. Supreme Court declaring that the old Board of Estimate was unconstitutional, land use and zoning were central concerns.
The Board of Estimate, with the mayor, comptroller and City Council president (the earlier name for the public advocate) each having two votes and each of the five borough presidents having one vote, handled land use matters. Since the board violated the principle of one person, one vote, with populous Brooklyn having the same weight as much smaller Staten Island, it was abolished and its powers devolved to the Council.
But as Mayor Ed Koch warned, writing to the Charter Revision Commission that “I fear that your proposal will give legislative legitimacy to the NIMBY reaction that now threatens to block any socially responsible land use policy. The legislative tradition of comity and deference, which grants one legislator, in essence, the power to determine the collective vote on matters affecting his or her district, means that any time a member of the City Council does not like a land use decision in his or her district, that member will have no difficulty mustering the required votes to take jurisdiction and vote it down. This is a sobering thought. We would run the risk of land use paralysis.”
Koch was right. The Council maintains the destructive practice of the local veto, which they call “member deference,” allowing, as Koch feared, a single member to thwart important projects.
What a great thing for the mayor’s commission to undo.