Mayor Adams’ Charter Revision Commission voted Thursday to approve a set of ballot referendum questions that would impose additional requirements on the municipal legislative process — a move City Council members have blasted as an executive power grab designed to stifle their oversight powers.
Marking the final step required to get the five questions onto November’s general election ballot, the vote came just two months after the mayor launched the commission and tasked it with crafting amendments to the City Charter he said would strengthen public safety and promote fiscal responsibility. The measures would build in additional time for bills related to public safety and require more detailed fiscal analysis of potential legislative costs.
The quick turn-around by Adams’ panel has prompted an outcry from Council Democrats, who say he’s using it as a vehicle to block a separate effort they’re undertaking to expand their so-called “advice-and-consent” powers over certain top mayoral appointments.
In a rally Thursday outside Brooklyn Public Library’s central branch ahead of the commission vote, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams argued the mayor’s proposals would give him legislative powers that should lie with her chamber.
“It is a dangerous attempt to shift power away from the people represented by the City Council to one single individual. Do you want a king?” said the speaker, who was joined by several city and state lawmakers who also oppose the mayor’s commission and responded with a resounding “no” in response to her question.
“If the proposals by this mayor’s commission ends up on the ballot in November, New Yorkers should oppose them,” the speaker added. “We don’t want a king in New York City. You can try that somewhere else but not here.”
A few hours later, the 13-member commission, whose members include several key political allies of the mayor, unanimously approved the ballot proposals. One of the members, Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz, was absent from the meeting, which was interrupted a handful of times by activists who booed and heckled the commission appointees.
The proposals will now be added to the back of city residents’ November ballots. They’ll become law if a majority support them.
The speaker and a number of progressive advocacy groups joining her at the rally vowed to launch a fundraising and organizational effort to urge New Yorkers to vote against the proposals.
Due to a quirk in state law, the commission’s submission of its proposals by an Aug. 5 deadline means the Council is blocked from getting a question it wanted onto November’s ballot that would give the chamber the advice-and-consent power to block 21 agency commissioner-level positions the mayor can currently appoint unilaterally. The mayor vehemently opposes that proposal.
Several of the speakers at Thursday’s rally outside the library charged that the true purpose of the mayor’s “sham” commission was all along to block the Council’s advice-and-consent expansion push — a charge he denies.
Of the five ballot proposals green-lit by the commission, one related to public safety has emerged as the most significant.
But in an unexpected reversal, the commission released a sharply scaled-back version of the public safety proposal.
Under the original proposal, the Council would’ve needed to wait 45 days after introducing any bill relating to the operations of the NYPD, the FDNY or the Department of Correction to hold a public hearing on it — a big jump from the three required under existing law. In a report released earlier this week, the mayor’s commission said such a delay will allow the three agencies to submit statements outlining how they believe they’d be impacted by any given public safety bill, and those statements would then need to be included in the public legislative records.
Additionally, the original proposal held that, after a hearing on a public safety bill, the Council would have to wait at least another 50 days before voting on it. That delay, the commission report said, would let the mayor or agency leaders hold their own hearings on the bill in question to “solicit additional public input.”
But the finalized version of the ballot proposal eliminated both waiting periods and simply proposed requiring the Council to notify the mayor’s office at least 30 days in advance of a vote on a public safety-related bill. That would allow the mayor or relevant agencies to hold their own public hearings on legislation in that timeframe, according to the commission’s updated report.
A Council source said the chamber already typically alerts the mayor’s office of votes 30 days in advance.
At Thursday’s hearing, Carlo Scissura, the chair of the mayor’s commission, said his team made the 11th hour tweak to the public safety proposal after receiving feedback on the original report released earlier this week.
Stefan Jeremiah/for New York Daily News
Carlo Scissura (Stefan Jeremiah/for New York Daily News)
“We listened to a lot of people, including members of the City Council,” he said.
The mayor has said the idea for the public safety proposal came from complaints he received about there supposedly having not being been enough time for public input on a bill adopted by the Council earlier this year that placed new requirements on the ways NYPD officers must document stops of civilians. The mayor vetoed that bill, claiming it would hamper police operations, but the Council overrode him to implement it anyway.
The second ballot proposal advanced by the commission Thursday would require the Council to release so-called fiscal impact statements — which estimate the cost of legislation — before holding a hearing on a bill. Currently, fiscal impact statements don’t need to be released until prior to a vote.
In addition, the proposal would require the Council to include in the public record a legislative cost analysis by the mayor’s budget office before voting on any bill that comes with a price-tag.
In a statement after the vote, the mayor said the proposed Charter amendments would ensure “the city is working as efficiently as possible for all its residents.”
In a post on X, Brooklyn Councilman Justin Brannan, who chairs the Council’s Finance Committee voiced concern about the ballot proposals, especially the one related to fiscal impact statements, creating government bottlenecks.
“Requiring OMB to submit estimates for every damn bill before we can hold a public hearing will grind government to a halt,” he wrote, using an acronym for the mayor’s Office of Management and Budget.
The three additional ballot questions approved by the commission have not received as much public attention, in part because Council members aren’t coming out against them. They relate to streamlining sanitation operations, reporting on repair needs in city-owned buildings and creating a new position in the city bureaucracy related to increasing diversity in the municipal government’s contracting protocols.
During Thursday’s hearing, former New York Rep. Max Rose, a member of the mayor’s commission, defended the ballot questions he and the other members put forward, but acknowledged there has been a lot of pushback.
“It’s impossible to make everyone happy whenever you’re trying to act in areas of significance,” he said before urging lawmakers and others to “continue to stay extraordinarily engaged over the coming months to make sure that the people’s voices continue to be heard.”
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