Mayor Adams’ charter review commission voted Thursday to approve a series of referendum questions that would impose additional requirements on the city’s legislative process — a move that City Council members called an executive grab aimed at stifling their oversight powers.
The vote, which marked the final step needed to get the five issues on the November general election ballot, came just two months after the mayor launched the commission and tasked it with crafting amendments to the city charter that he said would enhance public safety and promote fiscal responsibility. Those measures would provide additional time for public safety-related bills and require a more detailed fiscal analysis of potential legislative costs.
The speed with which Adams’ panel moved has sparked an outcry among Council Democrats, who say he is using it as a way to block a separate effort they are undertaking to expand their so-called “advice and consent” powers over some key mayoral appointments.
At a rally Thursday outside the Brooklyn Public Library’s central branch ahead of the commission’s vote, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams argued that the mayor’s proposals would give her legislative powers that should belong to her chamber.
“This is a dangerous attempt to transfer power from the citizens represented by the City Council to one 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” to her question.
“If the proposals from this mayoral commission end up on the ballot in November, New Yorkers should oppose them,” the House Speaker added. “We don’t want a king in New York. You can try that somewhere else, but not here.”
Hours later, the 13-member commission, including several key political allies of the mayor, unanimously approved the ballot proposals. One member, Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz, was absent from the meeting, which was repeatedly interrupted by activists who booed and jeered the commission’s appointees.
The proposals will now be added to the back of city residents’ ballots in November. They will become law if a majority supports them.
The president and a number of progressive advocacy groups who joined her at the rally vowed to launch a fundraising and organizing effort to urge New Yorkers to vote against the proposals.
Because of a quirk of state law, the commission’s submission of its proposals by the Aug. 5 deadline means the council can’t put a question it wanted on the November ballot, which would give the chamber the advice-and-consent power to block 21 agency commissioner positions that the mayor can currently appoint unilaterally. The mayor vehemently opposes that proposal.
Several of the speakers at Thursday’s rally outside the library claimed that the real goal of the mayor’s “bogus” commission from the start was to block the expansion of the council’s advice-and-consent system – a charge he denies.
Among the five voting proposals approved by the committee, one of them, related to public safety, proved to be the most important.
But in an unexpected turnaround, the commission released a greatly reduced version of the public safety proposal.
Under the original proposal, the Council would have had to wait 45 days after introducing a bill related to the operations of the NYPD, FDNY or Department of Correction to hold a public hearing on it, a big step up from the three days required under current law. In a report released earlier this week, the mayor’s commission said such a delay would allow all three agencies to submit statements describing how they believe they would be affected by a given public safety bill, and those statements would then have to be included in the public legislative record.
Additionally, the original proposal called for the council to wait at least 50 additional days after a hearing on a public safety bill before acting on it. That delay, according to the commission’s report, would allow the mayor or agency leaders to hold their own hearings on the bill in question to “solicit additional public input.”
But the final 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 before a vote on a public safety-related bill. That would allow the mayor or relevant agencies to hold their own public hearings on the legislation within that time frame, according to the commission’s updated report.
A council source said the chamber typically already notifies the mayor’s office of votes 30 days in advance.
At Thursday’s hearing, Carlo Scissura, the chairman of the mayor’s commission, said his team made last-minute changes to the public safety proposal after receiving feedback on the original report released earlier this week.
Stefan Jeremiah/for the New York Daily News
Carlo Scissura (Stefan Jeremiah/for the New York Daily News)
“We listened to a lot of people, including members of the city council,” he said.
The mayor said the idea for the public safety proposal came from complaints he received about the lack of time for the public to comment on a bill passed by the Council earlier this year that imposed new requirements on NYPD officers on how they must document stops of civilians. The mayor vetoed the bill, saying it would hamper police operations, but the Council overrode it and implemented it anyway.
The second voting proposal put forward by the committee Thursday would require the Council to issue budget impact statements — which estimate the cost of legislation — before holding a hearing on a bill. Currently, budget impact statements do not need to be issued before a vote.
Additionally, the proposal would require the Council to include in the public record a legislative cost analysis conducted by the Mayor’s Budget Office before voting on any bill that includes a price tag.
In a statement after the vote, the mayor said the proposed charter amendments would ensure that “the city operates as efficiently as possible for all of its residents.”
In a post on X, Brooklyn City Councilman Justin Brannan, who chairs the council’s finance committee, expressed concern that voting proposals, particularly the one on fiscal impact statements, were creating bottlenecks in government.
“Requiring the OMB to submit estimates for every bill before we can hold a public hearing will paralyze government,” he wrote, using the acronym for the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget.
The three additional issues approved by the commission have not received as much public attention, in part because council members do not oppose them. They involve streamlining sanitation operations, communicating repair needs in city-owned buildings and creating a new position within the city bureaucracy tied to increasing diversity in city government contracting protocols.
At Thursday’s hearing, former New York Rep. Max Rose, a member of the mayor’s commission, defended the ballot questions he and other members proposed, but acknowledged there had been a lot of resistance.
“It’s impossible to please everyone when you’re trying to take action on important issues,” he said, before urging lawmakers and others to “continue to remain extremely engaged over the coming months to ensure that the voice of the people continues to be heard.”
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