Charter Revision Commission Testimony from Frank Morano
Below is a collection of my written testimony to the NYC Charter Revision Commission. The Commission will be placing propositions on the ballot in 2019.
If you’re interested in learning more, you can go to their website http://www.charter2019.nyc/
Charter Revision Commission Testimony
September 20th, 2018 — Queens Borough Hall
Good evening Commissioners. As someone who has testified before every Charter Revision Commission since 2002 and by extension has sat through hundreds, perhaps thousands of suggestions from the public about more subjects than I can possibly count- including reforming the CCRB, changes to the Community Boards, abolishing certain offices, empowering certain offices, changes to mayoral succession, nonpartisan elections, changes to the Board of Standards and Appeals and scrutiny of every possible syllable in the city charter, I know full well they all tend to cover a lot of ground.
Now, most of these Commissions have been one-year Commissions and not two-year Commissions as this one is, but they’ve all had one thing in common: Every single one of these Commissions, especially those tasked with doing a comprehensive review of the city charter, has felt there was more work to do. Commissioners have felt that there were certain areas that required more testimony, certain topics that needed more scholarly research and public input and areas in which there just simply didn’t seem ample opportunity for appropriate discussion. At the conclusion of these Commissions, members of the Commission, citizen activists, students of municipal governance and good government advocates are all left hoping that the current Mayor or the next Mayor will appoint another Charter Revision Commission, consisting of responsible Commissioners to pick up the baton and carry it forward on all these subject areas. Unfortunately though, what generally happens is that whoever is the Mayor appoints a group of people, who act more like a task force as opposed to an independent tribunal, stocked by people who are more likely than not to do the Mayor’s bidding.
The reason this Commission offers so much promise is because while you certainly include some terrific Mayoral appointees, the fact that there are appointees from the other citywide officeholders, like the Speaker and the Borough Presidents, has allowed this Commission to have a political diversity and an independence that has been lacking in so many of the Commissions that have existed since 1988. It also offers a great deal of promise because it’s a two-year Commission, rather than rushing to complete its work in a single year. I suspect though that at the end of two years, many of you will still be left thinking that there’s still so much work to be done and hoping that the next Mayor or Speaker appoints a Commission to pick up where you’ve left off. There is a better way.
Humbly, I’m suggesting that you make the process you’re currently involved in permanent. Rather than leave the Charter Revision process to the whims of future Mayors and Speakers, why not put a question on the ballot that asks New Yorkers if the Charter Revision process should be permanent and regular? You could have it mandated in the City Charter that every two years, a diverse group of elected officials, like the ones that have appointed you, will have the opportunity to appoint a Charter Revision Commission, which would regularly hold hearings and public meetings around the city, taking up many of the issues of concern to New Yorkers. Then, on a biennial basis, this permanent Charter Commission would have the opportunities to put questions on the ballot.
Additionally though, this Commission could do a quarterly report to the City Council and the Mayor’s office recommending both changes to the city charter and legislative changes that might make certain charter revisions unnecessary. This new permanent Charter Commission wouldn’t preclude the Mayor from also appointing Charter Revision Commissions, but by having this Commission serve regularly and by guaranteeing a diverse political makeup, because of the nature of those making the appointments, this allows the work you’re doing to be studied, dissected analyzed and built upon by future Commissions. This way, you wouldn’t feel as if you’re playing “Beat the Clock” and obliged to rush to finish your work in order to get something on the ballot. It’s easy to imagine a scenario, for instance, in which you look at an issue like “Democracy Vouchers” and while the idea has some appeal, there might be a desire on the part of some to see how the program has worked out in Seattle before implementing it in New York. The fact that you know a new Commission, which some of you may be serving on, is coming would allow you to study the issue, hold hearings on the issue, hear expert testimony on the issue and then recommend to those come after you exactly where to pick up.
Some may see a Commission like this as unnecessary, costly and usurping the proper legislative role of the New York City Council. I don’t believe that’s the case. Because so much of the work of the City Council is focused on constituent service, oversight of municipal agencies and putting together the city’s budget, there’s actually very little time, attention and interest, quite frankly, in to the structure of city government itself. The job of a City Council member is, by definition, governed by issues that are politically expedient. A Commission focused solely on the structure, nature and scope of city government would allow the Council to implement changes that have been studied, debated and examined in-depth in a manner that even the most comprehensive City Council committee hearings don’t allow for. In many ways, this would free up council members to focus solely on the job of being a modern day councilman. I suspect there would be very few members who would say, “Wait a minute! I want to spend more time looking at whether or not the Procurement Policy Board should have members appointed by the Speaker” or “Don’t you dare take away our ability to determine the scope of the New York City Sports Commission.” The nice thing about it though was that the Council and the Mayor would be free to ignore the permanent Charter Commission’s recommendations and then it would be up to the voters whether or not they wanted to implement these changes. Hopefully, once New Yorkers see they not only have a stake in city government, but a direct voice, this will encourage them to learn more about municipal government and what’s happening in New York City in general. Too often, New Yorkers, who are already cynical by nature, feel as if their vote doesn’t matter, so the logical consequence is they simply choose to opt out and not pay attention. If voters know they can change the structure of city government itself, it will cause at least some of them to learn more about it.
Such a concept is hardly a new idea. At the state level, New Yorkers have repeatedly been the beneficiaries of a constitutional commission to prepare both voters and potential Constitutional Convention delegates for future conventions. The work done by these commissions has repeatedly been used to propose specific amendments to the constitution, even without a convention. The work done by such a constitutional convention in 1873 paved the way for constitutional changes the following year that were overwhelmingly adopted by the voters in areas like combating corruption, expanding suffrage and reforming both the state and legislative branches. s former New York Governor John Hoffman said in 1872 when he appointed the first of these constitutional commissions,
““Such a commission could have all the benefit of the debate incident to a larger body through intelligent discussion in the press, and the voluntary suggestions of thoughtful citizens; and would be almost certain to agree upon amendments which would secure the popular approval.”
Why wouldn’t the same thing hold true at a municipal level? Even Governor Andrew Cuomo recognized the importance of such Commissions. When he ran for Governor in 2010, he wrote in his campaign policy book “The New NY Agenda” that prior to any constitutional convention,
“….we should create a constitutional commission to help define the constitutional convention and issues that need to be addressed, including recommending amendments for passage. That blueprint will then provide the starting point for both the constitutional convention and any amendments made via voter approval at the ballot box. While less well-known than constitutional conventions, these commissions have been key tools used to amend our Constitution.”
Why is city government somehow less deserving of a similarly deliberative approach?
In addition to the nature of the Charter Revision process itself, there’s one specific proposal that I am hoping you’ll include in your proposals next year and that has to do with the process of getting on the ballot for public office in New York City. While there are specific requirements for how to get on the ballot in New York City that are governed by state law, the Charter Commission that Commissioner Fiala served on in 2010 cut by half the raw number of signatures needed to qualify for the ballot for every municipal office — something which has not only never been challenged in court, but helped pave the way for everyday New Yorkers who have sought to run for office, particularly without the backing of party machines or robust political operations, however you can go further.
Even with a lower petition requirement, our current process of qualifying candidates for the ballot is hopelessly flawed. In addition to being inefficient, wasteful, imprecise, frustrating and having no connection whatsoever to how effective an elected official will actually be once they’re in office, the petitioning process coupled with the city’s generous matching funds program, which now appears poised to soon jump to a generous 8–1 match, has created a cottage industry of consultants, attorneys, political operatives and hired guns who know how to game the system. In addition to being anachronistic, the petition process is needlessly costly. It’s an administrative nightmare, a horrendous waste of paper and a tremendous drain on the staff of the Board of Elections, who inevitably put in for a great deal of overtime come petition time. I would urge the Commission to put an end to this madness. I’m hoping the Commission will place a question on the ballot next year allowing an alternative to the existing petition process, whereby candidates would be able to qualify for the ballot by paying a filing fee equivalent to 1 percent of the salary of the public office you’re seeking. Not only would this save candidates and their volunteers countless hours toiling away in futility, but it would put the city in a position to actually make some money from those seeking to run for office. While the city is running a surplus now, we’ve seen history show that the good times never last forever. When there’s an economic downturn, this new revenue stream could allow the Board of Elections to have a dedicated funding stream without the City Council being forced to consider property tax increases, which take the worst toll on those who can least afford it.
Lest anyone think that this simply allows a shortcut for the wealthy to run for any office, you could keep the petition process in place and allow candidates to have a choice whether they want to circulate petitions or pay the filing fee. This hybrid approach has worked well in states like Florida, where almost all candidates choose to pay the filing fee. Additionally, while 1 percent of a $148,000 salary may seem onerous, when you compare that to the costs that campaigns often incur to hire attorneys, consultants and petition gatherers, it’s almost always the less costly option. Imagine what elections in our city would look like if candidates spent their campaigns persuading voters that they had the best ideas for the city’s future or convincing them that their background and life experience is best suited for the job they’re seeking, instead of making sure they printed in the right place, initialed next to an error on the address line or signed next to the X.
Thank you for your consideration of both of these proposals.
Sincerely,
Frank Morano
Secretary, New York State Reform Party
Radio Talk Show Host, AM 970 The Answer
816–6-MORANO
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Charter Revision Commission Testimony
September 24th, 2018 — College of Staten Island
Good evening Commissioners. This evening, I was hoping to focus on two specific proposals, which are somewhat related, both having to do with electoral reform. To begin with, it’s my hope that you will devote considerable time, attention and study to the issue of non-partisan municipal elections and place a question relating to it on the ballot in 2019. When looking at the issue though, it’s important to understand that we already have non-partisan elections in New York City, they just happen to be special elections. The councilmembers, for instance, who are elected in non-partisan elections, including Joe Borelli, Eric Ulrich, Mathieu Eugene and even two previous Speakers of the City Council, Gifford Miller and Christine Quinn, are no less competent or effective than their colleagues who were elected in a partisan election. There are many reasons to look at a transition to non-partisan elections for all elections, but by far the best one is the fact that literally millions of New Yorkers are excluded from having any meaningful influence in the selection of their own elected officials, because of their party registration. In roughly 47 council districts, I can tell you which party is going to win that council seat in 2021, 2023, 2025 and beyond. That’s not because of some visionary Kreskinesque ability to predict the future, it’s because in 45 of those districts, the winner of the Democratic Primary is all but guaranteed to the political makeup of the district to be elected and in two districts, the winner of the Republican primary is all but guaranteed election. This means that if you’re not participating in the primary of the dominant party, you’re essentially prohibited from being a part of choosing your own elected official(s). This is the case with four of the five Borough President elections as well.
Why should New Yorkers who care about their city’s future be barred from participating in elections? Occasionally, when I’ve raised this argument in the past, people have said that what voters should do is join the dominant political party in order to participate in the primary. No doubt, that’s what many New Yorkers choose to do. Michael Goodwin, for example, one of New York’s most prominent conservative columnists, has stated in the pages of The New York Post that he remains a registered Democrat for this very reason. But why should they have to? Do you know how insulting that suggestion is to someone who believes fervently in the virtues of Republicanism, but has the misfortune of living in a Democratic district? Do you really want to tell someone who’s certain that Donald Trump is a racist, Russian agent with a double digit IQ that they have to register as a Republican simply to vote for their councilman? To me, that argument is absolutely absurd. Why not simply allow every New Yorker to participate in every stage of the process?
The counter argument that I often hear when I’ve brought up non-partisan elections in the past is that seeing a party label on the ballot offers a helpful hint to the voter in terms of a cognitive shortcut to understand what a candidate’s values are. This is completely unfounded. If you wanted to take two people whose politics are absolutely polar opposite they would be Inez Barron and Chaim Deutch, yet both of them are registered Brooklyn Democrats. I think that goes to show how meaningless these labels are. Simcha Felder and our former state senator, the late John Marchi, both routinely ran as the nominee of the Democratic and Republican Parties. What possible clue could voters get about their beliefs based on that? Rudy Giuliani was the nominee of the Liberal Party three times. Anyone who has seen his most recent TV interview with Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel can tell you that he’s many things, but a Liberal isn’t one of them. The former Democratic leader of the New York State Senate, Malcolm Smith, used to run as the nominee of the Republican Party. Our former Borough President James Molinaro was a leader in the Conservative Party and ran as their party’s candidate for public office four times in spite of the fact that he repeatedly endorsed some of the state’s leading Democrats including Andrew Cuomo and Chuck Schumer. What’s conservative about that? What are the voters learning? Nothing!
The other reason that I believe it’s so important for the city to allow all voters to participate is because all of the voters (even the ones without a party) are paying for these elections. These citizens are taxpayers. Why should they be forced to pay for an election that they can’t participate in? To continue to allow them to be second-class citizens smacks of political bigotry, and in a city that prides itself on being a progressive leader is one of the most discriminatory things I can imagine. It’s taxation without representation.
Half of the 50 largest cities in the country have some form of non-partisan municipal elections and they’ve somehow managed to survive. So would our city. There’s no reason to fear non-partisan elections. The thought that somehow in a district that always elects liberal Democrats, a conservative Republican is going to find his way into office by fooling the voters is simply ludicrous. There will be no shortage of ambitious Democratic politicians running in those districts and there will be no shortage of ambitious Republican politicians in the two districts that tend to elect Republicans. The only things non-partisan elections would change is allowing all voters to have a voice and not allowing the party bosses to limit the ability of candidates to run for office. The Democratic Party would still exist, as would the Republican Party, the Conservative Party and (hopefully) the Reform Party. Nothing would stop any of us from telling people who we’d like them to vote for, working on their behalf or issuing endorsements in our party’s name. Let the people vote.
If the Commission does choose to put a question regarding non-partisan elections on the ballot, I sincerely hope that you’ll not emulate the work of the 2003 Charter Revision Commission and make it simply a transition to “Top Two,” where the two highest vote getters would advance to a runoff. To do so, would severely limit the choices of the voters and make it all but impossible for the minor parties to offer even token opposition. California recently converted to such a system and they’ve seen voter participation plummet noticeably. If you think about it, why would a Republican voter care to show up for a general election in which he’s forced to choose between two Democrats, who he might despise equally (as is the case in the U.S. Senate race in CA this year)? Additionally, it’s a system that lends itself to political gamesmanship. Recently in the California governor’s race for instance, we saw supporters of one of the Democratic candidates run ads supporting the leading Republican for office in the first round, because it was thought that person would be easier to defeat (a strategy which seems to have worked). It’s also a system which produces bizarre results that are unrepresentative of the district. There are some Democratic districts, where there are seven or eight Democratic candidates running and only two Republicans. In instances like this, there have been several occasions where the two Republican candidates ended up as the choice for a Democratic district, because the Democratic candidates had divided their supporters. France also utilizes a similar system and its recent presidential election saw Californian style opting out as many Republican voters didn’t want to choose between one candidate who they believed was a Xenophobe and a racist and another candidate who’d been a part of a Socialist administration. Similarly, many Socialist voters didn’t want to choose between someone on the far right and a banker that they believed represented the sort of crony capitalism that the Socialist Party exists to oppose. They had no other options. No Republican candidate, no Socialist candidate, no independent candidate. What sense does that make? Fortunately, there is a better way.
If the Commission does put a question on the ballot next year, I would urge you to consider non-partisan elections with ranked-choice voting (aka instant runoff voting), in which voters get to rank their choices. Any candidate for any election with a majority of first choice votes gets elected. If no candidate has a majority, then the candidate with the least number of first-choice votes would see his votes go to the second choice of his supporters. This saves money on a second election, produces elected officials that are more representative of the communities they serve, allows for minority parties to offer a choice to the voters in the general election and eliminates the so-called “spoiler effect” in which voters avoid voting for the candidate they like best out of fear that they’ll elect the candidate they must oppose. Even if the Commission chooses not to place a question regarding non-partisan elections on the ballot, I hope you’ll consider implementing ranked choice voting in all municipal elections, even if you keep the existing party primary structure.
Thank you for your consideration of both of these proposals.
Sincerely,
Frank Morano
Secretary, New York State Reform Party
Radio Talk Show Host, AM 970 The Answer
816–8-MORANO
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Charter Revision Commission Testimony
September 27th, 2018 — City Hall, Manhattan.
Good evening Commissioners. You have many challenges to deal with, not the least of which is doing a comprehensive analysis of a City Charter, which takes up 75 Chapters and literally thousands of pages, but one of the problems the public has is that we don’t necessarily know which proposals you’re going to put on the ballot, so it may make certain proposals a moot point. For instance, if you’re proposing the abolition of the office of Public Advocate, it doesn’t make sense for members of the public to make proposals about changing the nature of the office or how that person is elected. If you’re going to propose allowing Community Board members to be elected, it doesn’t make sense for the public to spend much time on whether the Borough President or the Councilmembers should be appointing them. In my case, I’ve previously proposed allowing candidates to run for office by paying a filing fee instead of collecting petition signatures. Now, if that suggestion gets ignored or for any reason you find it impractical, I would for example suggest lowering the percentage requirement for designating petitions to 2.5% rather than 5%. Currently the system we have is discriminatory towards minor parties because it requires minor party candidates to get a number of signatures equal to 5% of their registration, while depending on the district, Republicans or Democrats may only need to get a number equal to a fraction of one percent of their registration. This makes absolutely no sense especially when you consider that minor parties traditionally have far fewer resources than their major party counterparts.
In the same vein, it doesn’t make sense for me to make suggestions about ballot access for minor party candidates, if you’re going to place on the ballot a question relating to non-partisan elections. So, I would suggest that the best way to handle this is that as you continue your deliberations, you devote an evening (or maybe even a series of evenings) specifically devoted to hearing expert testimony on the issues of ballot access and electoral reform. I hope that in addition to looking at the issue of non-partisan municipal elections in councilmanic districts similar to how they’re constituted now, I hope that this Commission will seriously look at the issue of electing the City Council through Proportional Representation. Many of you may be aware that Proportional Representation is used in western democracies all over the world to elect their legislative bodies, in countries like Germany, Italy, Israel and Japan, just to name a few. You may not know though is that we had Proportional Representation in New York City for eleven years from 1936–1947. Voters and Mayor LaGuardia were fed up with the corrupt and ineffective Board of Alderman, so Mayor LaGuardia appointed a Charter Revision Commission just like you, who offered the voters a better way. In many respects, this experiment with democracy in New York City was the golden age of legislative diversity in New York City. Not only did we see the first African-American members of the New York City Council elected, but we saw independent Democrats who weren’t beholden to Tammany Hall get elected. We saw Republicans actually get elected in a proportion equal to how voters were actually voting. We even saw many members of minor parties elected for the very first time. So, not only was it an age of racial and gender diversity in city government, but it was an era of political diversity as well. Unfortunately, this system had the misfortune of being around at the height of the red scare in this country and because there were two Communists who were elected, Tammany Hall and other machine politicians used their election to paint Proportional Representation as a tool of Communists, which in the midst of the Cold War would give Communists a foothold in the halls of American government. There’s a terrific book about this era in city government called “Defining Democracy: Electoral Reform and the struggle for power in New York City” by Dr. Daniel Prosterman, whose a distinguished political scientist and Professor.
It may seem contradictory for me to propose non-partisan elections on Monday and Proportional Representation on Thursday. But as Francis Barry points out in his book “The Scandal of Reform”, the elections held under Proportional Representation were non-partisan! Every registered voter was able to participate at every stage of the process. Now, there were many different aspects of Proportional Representation, which were vastly different from how we generally think about implementing non-partisan elections, not the least of which was that there weren’t 51 different local districts, instead the elections were held on a boroughwide basis, which is something that people may not necessarily want to turn back to. But an organization called Fairvote, has an interesting proposal for how to balance the best aspects of Proportional Representation, with the best aspects of having local districts. So, I’d encourage you to hold at least one night solely devoted to the study of Proportional Representation, perhaps including testimony from Dr. Prosterman, Mr. Barry and the CEO of Fairvote Rob Richie. It seems silly to completely abandon such a vibrant era in city government just because of red-baiting in the late 40s.
Initiative and Referendum
I briefly had the opportunity to address the issue of initiative and referendum in response to a question from Commissioner Albanese in Queens on September 20th, but there were four suggested changes that I wanted to reiterate as you consider how to allow New Yorkers themselves to pass laws.
1. I think the current signature threshold is far too high. The 50,000 minimum signature number or 45,000 signatures if voters use the alternative two-step method. I would urge the commission to lower it.
2. The Mayor should not be able pre-empt a ballot question by appointing a Charter Revision Commission, as Mayor Bloomberg did with the UFT’s ballot proposition on smaller class size.
3. Aside from charter change, New Yorkers should have the ability to petition for legislative questions as well. If New Yorkers feel passionately about free lunch for 7th graders or mandating that police officers live in New York City or that every borough gets a bike share program, why shouldn’t they be able to petition for that? This initiative process has worked well in states like Arizona and California.
4. Lastly, sometimes there are decisions, which are better decided by a legislature than by the masses. What if you were to allow voters to collect petition signatures to force the City Council to vote on a piece of legislation? Too often it seems as if meritorious bills get buried in the committee process and never make it to the full council for a vote. Generally, we know that if a bill comes to the floor of the City Council for a vote, it’s assured of passage. That’s the sort of thing, which smacks of an insider dominated governmental process, heavily influenced by special interests. This only makes the crisis of public confidence and the pandemic cynicism among New Yorkers, even more pronounced. Let’s change it.
Make Community Board Districts coterminous with Council Districts
Currently, there are 51 Council districts and 59 Community Board districts. What this leads to is two, three or four council members all representing portions of the same Community Board districts. That means they send a staffer each to every Community Board meeting. That means, the district manager and staff have to brief each of those councilmembers on community issues. That means that the Chair (or Committee Chairs), need to lobby multiple councilmembers instead of one to make sure the Community Board’s will is done on land use proposals. This system is duplicative, wasteful, inefficient and often ineffective. I would suggest instead that you make Community Board Districts match up directly with Council Districts. This would allow each councilmember to have more familiarity with Board members and staff. It would allow the staff of a Councilmember the opportunity to be more intimately familiar with the issues that repeatedly come up in that Community Board and wouldn’t cause them to need to devote a staffer to a board meeting, in a district, where they may only represent a small portion of the community. So, I’d suggest either reducing the number of community districts from 59 to 51 or increasing the number of council districts to 59. In addition to the benefits of greater efficiency and more precise specialization, this sort of coterminous districting, could potentially pave the way for other types of districts as well, possibly even including fire districts, police precincts or civil court districts. The issue of coterminous districts was studied at length by the state charter revision commission on for New York City was convened back in 1972 and even back then, the Commission staffed determined that “the individual New Yorker lives in a jurisdictional maze….having the net effect of making it more awkward and difficult than it should be for the ordinary citizen to get things done”. This problem has gotten even worse today and it often seems like New Yorkers need a decoder ring to find out who to call for what problem. It shouldn’t be that way and I hope you’ll give New Yorkers the choice to simplify that just a bit.
Since this is the last hearing that’s scheduled for at least a while, I wanted to call your attention to a few other tweaks to the city charter, which I believe the public could strongly benefit from.
Allow Borough Presidents to make appointees to the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC)
Currently, the Mayor appoints all nine appointees to the TLC, with the advice and consent of the City Council. While there is a mandate that there’s at least one appointee from each borough, those appointed don’t necessarily represent the interests and values of the voters of a particular borough. The reason that this is so important now in an era where so many of the public policy debates in our city focus on Uber, Lyft and other ride hail services is because those of us that live in the outer boroughs have been woefully underserved by many different aspects of transportation- buses and subways and even taxi service. I think one way to give Staten Islanders, who are accustomed to waiting an hour after a missed ferry or trying to persuade a yellow taxi driver to drive to Staten Island from lower Manhattan, a voice in these issues, is to allow our Borough President at least one appointee. The fear that many of us, who live in transportation deserts have is that the recently enacted cap on ride hail vehicles will only add to the scarcity of outer borough transportation options, because drivers may cruise around Manhattan, awaiting only the expensive and easy fares. So, allowing each Borough President an appointee on the TLC is by no means a panacea, but at the very least it gives us a voice. Sometimes when you’re a frustrated commuter used to standing on express buses, waiting for a late ferry or seeing your uber driver cancel on you without reason, voice being given to those frustrations can be incredibly satisfying- even if it doesn’t lead to concrete results.
The Form of Ballot Questions
While different Charter Revision Commissions have made different decisions in terms of how to place these questions on the ballot, sometimes putting many diverse policy areas on the ballot as one question, under the theory that the Commission’s work represents a comprehensive examination of the areas in which the city charter needs improvement and that’s how voters should approach it. This was the case with the Schwartz commission back in 1989. Sometimes as was the case in 2010, it’s determined that all of the proposals should be on the ballot in one questions because of how much room there is on the ballot. This year though, the three questions the Mayoral commission has put on the ballot are on there as three separate questions. I would strongly urge the Commission to not put unrelated and diverse suggested policy changes on the ballot as one question. While it may make sense to group proposals related to electoral reform or community boards or policing or budgeting together, I think to put all of your work to a single yes or no vote would be a mistake. We saw that this was precisely what happened with the proposed amendments to the state constitution back in 1967. The delegates to the constitutional convention did some great work on issues related to education, municipal home rule and reform of the court system, but because of the controversy involved in a question having to do with the repeal of the Blaine Amendment, New Yorkers ended up voting no on the entire proposed constitution and making the work of the delegates all for naught. I fear that if this Commission puts on a controversial or hot button issue like some of the issues you’ve heard testimony about that this could torpedo some of the common sense reforms that you’re considering.
Voter Representation on Future Charter Revision Commissions
While the composition of this commission is politically diverse and represents a broad cross section of governmental stakeholders and geographic fairness, at the end of the day, it’s composed only of people appointed by politicians, just like every previous Mayoral commission. Given the fact that so many of the proposals you’re considering involve ways to make city government more effective, more progressive and more representative to the needs of New Yorkers, why not allow New Yorkers themselves to have some direct representation? So, I would suggest that you consider mandating that for all future charter revision commissions, you allow New Yorkers to elect at least one borough wide member of the charter revision commission and at least one member of the commission that represents the city as a whole. Having six members of future commissions elected by the voters still allows the Mayor or the Speaker to have a controlling majority of the commission and by extension controlling the agenda, but by giving the voters a voice, it allows them to have a direct say on some of the proposals the commission would consider. In order to avoid the same sort of special interest control being exerted in these elections that we see in other municipal elections, I would hope that these elections would be completely non-partisan, that there be full public financing for these elections and that any current elected official be prohibited from appearing on the ballot for this position.
Other
While I’m not offering any specific policy proposals, I would urge the commission to consider holding hearings (or public meetings), featuring expert testimony on some of the following areas:
· Campaign finance and the imposition of a system similar to “Democracy Vouchers” in Seattle. Also a potential ban campaign contributions from employees of non-profit organizations, who get discretionary funding from the city council
· Recall for NYC elected officials
· Reform of the selection process for city Judges
· The role of the Public Advocate and mayoral succession
· Changes to the management of city pension funds and the role of the City Comptroller’s office
· Separating Animal Care and Control from the NYC Department of Health
Sincerely,
Frank Morano
Secretary, New York State Reform Party
Radio Talk Show Host, AM 970 The Answer
816–8-MORANO
