Earlier this year, at a small meeting at City Hall between Mayor Eric Adams and leaders of an anti-crime group, two attendees complained about a New York City Council bill requiring the police to document more interactions with the public. They suggested that the mayor convene a charter revision commission to lessen the likelihood of similar legislation passing again.
Three weeks later, the mayor formed the commission, tapping several of the community leaders and other loyalists to serve on it.
On Tuesday, that commission did exactly what it set out to do.
The commission proposed hampering the City Council’s ability to pass legislation affecting the public safety operations of the Police Department, the Department of Correction and the Fire Department.
The proposed amendment to the City Charter, which is effectively the city’s constitution, would force the City Council to wait 45 days, instead of the current three days, to hold hearings on proposed public safety legislation once it is announced. After those hearings, the Council would have to wait at least another 50 days before voting on the matter. State law currently requires the Council to wait seven days after a bill is finalized before voting on it, according to a Council spokesman.
Should the commission approve the proposed referendum on Thursday, as it almost certainly will, city residents will have the opportunity to vote on it in November.
Thanks to the complicated mechanics governing ballot referendums, the mayor’s proposal is expected to push off the ballot a City Council proposal designed to limit the mayor’s power — a result that the Council speaker, Adrienne Adams, does not believe was accidental.
“We believe that the charter commission was indeed empaneled to thwart that effort,” Ms. Adams, who is not related to the mayor, said on NY1 last week.
The Council’s proposal would have required the mayor to seek its approval for nearly two dozen mayoral appointees. In a statement issued Tuesday, a Council spokeswoman, Julia Agos, called the mayor’s charter revision commission a “sham.”
A spokeswoman for the mayor, whose office forwarded the final recommendations to the news media, declined to comment on the proposals. But during a media availability on Tuesday, the mayor dismissed concerns that he was rushing the process.
“Being rushed is introducing legislation in a week,” Mr. Adams said. “We allowed New Yorkers to come in and speak. And part of the recommendation that people are saying, before you do these changes in law, people should have a right to come in and speak.”
Mr. Adams ran for office on a promise to make New York City safer. Overall crime fell in the city last year compared with 2022, in keeping with national trends. But with major crimes still higher than before the pandemic, New Yorkers continue to express concern about safety.
The mayor announced his charter revision commission on May 21, giving the commission nine weeks to review the entire City Charter, hold public hearings in every borough and make recommendations to change the charter. Those public hearings were sometimes poorly attended.
The speed with which the mayor assembled the commission sparked criticism that he was seeking to hastily alter the structure of city government in an effort to get his proposals onto the ballot, and dislodge the Council’s.
“They didn’t take enough time to look at things really carefully,” said Betsy Gotbaum, the executive director of Citizens Union, a good-government group whose chairman Mr. Adams wants to appoint corporation counsel.
During the mayor’s Tuesday media availability, his chief counsel argued that the seeming haste was not uncommon.
“There have been multiple charter revision commissions that took place in a shorter time than this one,” said the chief counsel, Lisa Zornberg. “Mayor Bloomberg did one in 2002; the start to finish: 38 days. There were three others between 1998 and 2001, all under 60 days or under 50 days. So I really don’t think that whether something is rushed is the right word or not. I think maybe the better word to ask is, was it efficient?”
The commission’s final report justified singling out public safety legislation for more extensive review by pointing to the City Council’s passage of legislation earlier this year requiring police officers to document more of their interactions with the public. The report noted that “officials from public safety agencies and unions representing public safety professionals testified that the Council has passed legislation without sufficient consultation or discussion with agencies.”
But Ms. Agos, the Council spokeswoman, said that the mayor’s commission had developed its own recommendations without engaging with the Council.
The mayor’s commission noted that the proposed new hearing requirements could still be waived — by the mayor.
“This is a power grab by the mayor,” said Theo Oshiro, the co-executive director of Make the Road New York, an immigrant rights group. “The mayor already holds outsized power when it comes to public safety and now he wants more. Putting limitations on the council’s ability to affect public safety policy is an end run around the council’s ability to do its job as a coequal branch of our government.”
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