When the city's
Charter Revision Commission scheduled a hearing at Hostos Community College in the Bronx earlier this month, the first plan was to hold it in the school's large Repertory Theater. As the event approached the location was shifted to a smaller meeting hall. When commission chairman Matthew Goldstein gaveled the April 12 meeting to order, there were people in every seat and lined up along two walls. It turns out that they needed a bigger room.
With the first round of public hearings done, the commission faces another decision on getting the right fit. How much of New York City's government does it want to consider changing? And is the time between now and November enough time to weigh those changes?
The 15 members of the commission, appointed by Mayor Bloomberg in March, are now exchanging ideas on which topics to highlight during "issue forums" beginning in May, in which experts will testify on those aspects of the city's charter—the 400-page city constitution—that the commission is considering amending.
After the hearings in each borough, "What I really felt from people is that they are looking to the charter revision commission to restore their faith in government," says Anthony Perez Cassino, a commission member. "That's the undercurrent."
Cassino tells City Limits that some of the topics the commission is likely to take up—for example, term limits—won't be a surprise. Once you move beyond those no-brainers, however, things get complicated. People might share a desire for a government they can believe in, but they're all over the map on what that government should look like. Here are some of the ideas that emerged in public testimony so far:
More power for borough presidents: Manhattan's Borough President Scott Stringer was alone in not asking for enhanced powers for his current office. Staten Island's James Molinaro asked for the modest power to convene multiagency meetings with commissioners from key agencies. Helen Marshall, the borough president in Queens, said she seeks an independent budget (borough presidents, or "beeps," currently are at the mercy of the mayor and Council), the right to chair a borough infrastructure committee and more authority in the land use process. BP Marty Markowitz in Brooklyn went further than that: In addition to more power over city planning decisions and independent funding, he wants authority to fund youth services and "advise and consent" authority overall the mayor's appointments of borough commissioners in city agencies. Perhaps the most ambitious was the Bronx's Ruben Diaz, Jr. who asked for independent budgeting, more land use power, a vote on the Board of Standards and Appeals and more muscular "borough service cabinets." If the voters approved changes to the beeps' role, they would apply to all borough presidents.Nonpartisan elections Voted down in 2003 and a favorite of Bloomberg and the Independence Party, whom the mayor generously funds and on whose ballot line he has run, nonpartisan elections were a topic in each borough hearing. Advocates for them say party primaries, which are often decisive in Democrat-dominated New York, disenfranchise voters who aren't Democrats.
