Another spin of Charter roulette: Council Speaker Adrienne Adams must avoid a power play

Whether or not if you’d had enough of the city’s Charter Revision Commission, with five proposal questions on the back of the presidential election ballot, get ready for more. Tomorrow, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams will introduce legislation to create a new Charter Revision Commission.

Provided it doesn’t dilute the mayor’s authority by politicizing the process, the City Charter, the “constitution” of city government, needs some changes that the current panel ignored. However, we do have real concerns about the structure and goals of the speaker’s new commission.

For starters, there is the membership. While mayoral commissions are entirely picked by the mayor, the previous Council-passed commission (created in 2018 and its recommendations approved by the voters in 2019) was balanced with four selected by the speaker, four by the mayor and one each by the public advocate, comptroller, and five borough presidents. None of the appointing officials had a majority among the 15 members.

Speaker Adams wants the new body to have 17 members, with her getting a majority, nine, and one each for the mayor and other seven officials.

But aside from the composition, such a Council-heavy commission should not try to alter the balance of power in our strong-mayor system, whoever the mayor is. We need a robust mayor, focused on the interests of the entire city of 8 million-plus New Yorkers. Again, it’s not about personalities. The last mayor, this mayor and the next mayor and all those to follow, need the ability to govern a vast and complex city. There’s a reason it’s called “The Second Toughest Job in America.”

The Council’s effort to change the City Charter to expand their confirmation oversight from a few mayoral appointments, like corporation counsel, to almost all of them, is a very bad kind of revision. It was that wrong-headed push for more advice and consent clout that caused Mayor Adams to appoint the present Charter Revision Commission in May.

The primary objective of the mayor’s commission was to knock the Council’s confirmation referendum off this year’s ballot, which is what happened and it got the Council upset. And so now comes the speaker again.

Under the state Municipal Home Rule law, there are many paths for any of the 62 cities of New York State (from NYC to the upstate Big Five of Buffalo, Yonkers, Rochester, Syracuse and Albany to tiny Mechanicville and Little Falls) to change their charters.

There are four ways to establish a Charter Revision Commission. The mayor can create one by his sole action, which is what Mayor Adams did in May with the present panel. The Council can set one up through legislation, which is what Speaker Adams is aiming for. The Council can also put before voters a referendum if they want a commission and the final method is collecting signatures to have such a referendum.

Absent a commission, voters can collect petitions to directly alter the charter with a referendum, as happened with term limits, or on some matters, the Council can just vote to amend the charter.

Should a Council create a commission, it should stay clear of the advice and consent quicksand or the mayor (meaning any mayor) should block them again. The single best change would be to expand the primary ranked choice voting of the 2018/2019 Council-created commission to include everyone, not just primary voters. There is nothing that would enhance democracy as much as that.