What can Mamdani’s Charter Revision Commission really accomplish?
For many New Yorkers, government inefficiency is a personal experience. It is the months an apartment building waits for a permit — a delay that shows up later in higher rents. It is the extra time a family spends in a shelter because an intractable process cannot get them into an available home. It is sidewalk sheds that sit for years and road repairs that never come. It is unanswered 311 requests and energy costs that ratchet up while clean energy sits untapped. When the City lets inertia get the best of it, residents suffer through lost time and higher costs — or are forced out due to high costs and a lack of services.
Judging both by what he says and his actions thus far, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani understands that a better-functioning government is necessary. He also understands that for voters to trust him with higher taxes and more ambitious programs, they need to see a government capable of delivering what it is already assigned. His Commission on Government Efficiency — a charter revision commission that follows in the footsteps of his SPEED Task Force on housing production, the naming of Chief Savings Officers to deliver efficiency in agencies, and more — is his latest effort to shake New York out of its inertia. We testified before the commission and came away encouraged. The commissioners, a diverse group that brings deep expertise, pushed on the substance, and the staff is eager to engage ambitiously with big ideas.
Powers and limits of the charter
The City Charter is often referred to as New York City’s constitution, but it’s less powerful than that and easier to change. The charter is a creature of the state, which means that it cannot override (and indeed can be overridden by) the state Constitution and state law. Within the city, the parts of the charter that establish the framework for city government (i.e., what offices exist and how we elect them) require a referendum (usually proposed by a charter reform commission) to change (e.g., the city eliminated the Board of Estimates in 1989 after the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional). Within those margins, the Council can change the charter on its own (e.g., by changing the responsibilities of a department).
Within city government and politics, though, charter reform commissions have an interesting role. The commissioners are often (but not always) less bound by the traditional stakeholders of city politics as they do not have to be reelected and the brief nature of the assignment tends to bring an air of creativity that is not always present in permanent legislative bodies (even if they may have the same or greater power). Last year's charter commission is a good example. The commission's final report put five amendments before voters last November, four of which passed. The outcomes that those amendments sought — faster City approvals and a fairer distribution of housing — likely could have been pursued through legislation, but the Council, and indeed state legislature, had been obstacles for years. The charter gave reform a path that bypassed member deference (the practice of voting with the member affected by zoning change or project siting, which often resulted in blocked projects) and put the question to voters directly. That combination of a big change that powerful incumbents may resent can be the sweet spot for COGE.
Our proposals
Abundance is about making it easier, faster, and cheaper to build what New Yorkers need, primarily housing, faster transit, and clean energy. We see government capacity as essential to an abundance agenda because of what it unlocks. To name a few examples: a government that spends less time hiring can spend more time delivering services; reducing the cost of a new subway station can enable the MTA ton extend subways further on the same budget; and private developers can build faster when we find ways to reduce friction in builders’ interactions with the government.
For too long, government at all levels has insisted that all kinds of projects need to follow the same approval processes and that process should be as strenuous as what we would have the biggest, most complex and most odious project go through. For the smaller, simpler, clearly beneficial projects, we simply shrug and explain that’s how it is. But it doesn’t need to be. The City can change the rules to benefit projects that we decide that we want more of — electric vehicle chargers, solar panels, and bike lanes — and keep hurdles for projects that we do not prioritize. The government, democratically elected, can express an opinion on what to build via the process it does or does not require.
Here are seven proposals that we think would meaningfully improve how the government works that would be worth a charter amendment to achieve.
- Require the mayor to submit a five-year government workforce plan, modeled on the capital strategy. More than 13,000 city jobs sat vacant as of January 2026. The Department of Buildings (DOB) and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), each critical for solving the housing crisis, had vacancies above 10%. The path from a civil service exam to a start date can run well past a year. Those gaps are filled through overtime that has climbed to $2.71 billion and outside contracts that have reached 22% of operating expenses, both substantially up from what they were 10 years ago. The capital strategy is a 10-year plan of what major projects the city intends to build and where; funding for the plan is approved by the council as part of the budget and informed by community boards citywide. By requiring the mayor to submit a workforce plan covering hiring targets, hiring and management process reform, and training, the charter would create a regular checkpoint to modernize hiring rules, inform the city’s collective bargaining strategy, and staff the administration's policy goals. The federal government builds the staffing actions into its biggest programs — changing hiring rules for the Biden Administration's infrastructure bill, CHIPS and Science Act, and more generally to meet the unique hiring needs of disaster recovery. Further, the state's NY HELPS program — by which the Civil Service Commission has waived exams and streamlined hiring for state and local government (by opt-in) positions, which the City can and should also opt into — has demonstrated that hiring flexibility works without the corruption critics predicted.
- Modernize the Department of Buildings by granting it singular permitting and inspection authority and giving it the ability to change the building code through rulemaking. Between 2010 and 2023, a new building of five or more units took about 18 months to permit, with four years often passing between filing and occupancy — time owners spent paying taxes, debt service, and insurance on a project that is not making money. One project may need permits from DOB, the Fire Department, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the Department of Parks and Recreation, and HPD, each on its own clock. The mayor's SPEED Task Force released a roadmap for progress, but bigger change is required. Agencies with charter authority to run permitting operations will not relinquish that power voluntarily. San Francisco consolidated intake and recorded a 28% drop in processing time. As for the building code, New York already amends its construction code by rule everywhere in the state other than the city.
- Consolidate clean energy permitting — rooftop and community solar, battery storage, heat pumps, and interconnection sign-offs — in a single office at the Department of Environmental Protection. Installing a heat pump or battery storage system can require sign-offs from DOB, the Fire Department, and Con Edison — each on its own clock. New York carries among the highest residential electricity rates in the country, and fragmented permitting suppresses the distributed generation that would add supply and lower bills. The state showed the single-forum model works for large projects through the Office of Renewable Energy Siting and extended it to transmission through the RAPID Act. We can make similar progress in the city by centralizing the permitting process for these projects, which may also lead to streamlining with Con Edison too.
- Speed the city's own capital projects through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) — waiving review for projects at or below $5 million and expediting it in districts that do not have their fair share of a given facility type. Last year, voters approved streamlining ULURP reviews for housing projects and specifically for projects in areas that have not built their share of affordable housing. This proposal applies that logic to public capital projects. City projects must go through ULURP, which lasts at least seven months, and means that New Yorkers must wait for the simplest minor projects, e.g., a new water fountain or public bathroom. By waiving ULURP for minor city projects ($5 million is roughly the median project size), we can get these smaller projects done faster and focus limited public attention on bigger issues. Further, the City has a fair share framework that does roughly what you would expect it to do — direct that things New Yorkers want (e.g., parks) and things they don’t want, but the city needs (e.g., garbage truck garages) are fairly distributed. However, multiple audits have found that the framework is not enforced. The expedited ULURP process introduced by last year’s charter reforms presents an enforcement mechanism that the commission should use.
- Improve procurement by raising the small-purchase threshold and clarifying that the mayor is in the driver’s seat. New York City registered more than $42 billion in contracts in fiscal year 2025, spread across nearly 13,000 individual procurements, and a dense set of rules set by the Procurement Policy Board and the charter govern how those dollars can be spent. The small purchase threshold — below which agencies can buy without formal competition — has sat at $100,000 since the 1989 charter and has not been adjusted for inflation. Routine purchases get routed through a pipeline built for major contracts, tying up agency time and contributing to a payment backlog the comptroller found tops $1 billion in unpaid invoices. Reform proposals wait for the Procurement Policy Board (PPB), which does not meet on any regular schedule and has often lacked clear direction. The federal government’s equivalent to the small purchase threshold is now at $350,000 and is tied to inflation. Doing the same for the City — and giving the mayor the ability to act when the PPB is silent, subject to its override — would free agencies to focus oversight where it belongs.
- Amend the charter to direct the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) to weigh housing impact when it designates historic districts and approves apartment consolidations. The 2025 Charter Revision Commission examined historic districts, which cover much of Manhattan — about 30% of its lots — and add barriers to new housing. Research by the National Bureau of Economic Research and New York University's Furman Center found that historic designation cuts new construction by about 14 units a year citywide and 22 in Manhattan, where it forecloses the redevelopment of low-rise lots into denser housing. Further, studies show that since 1950, New York City has lost more than 100,000 homes through apartment consolidation — the combining of units into larger ones — which occurs more frequently in historic districts. As pro-housing advocacy group Open New York has argued, an amendment could require the LPC, in consultation with the City Planning Commission, to analyze the housing impact of proposed districts in low-growth neighborhoods and to weigh neighborhood-wide effects when approving consolidations in landmarked buildings. The residents of historic districts are disproportionately white and college-educated, and a process that now passes over housing tradeoffs would have to reckon with them—producing fewer designations in low-growth neighborhoods and more in places that carry their share. Other states have moved the same way, with California allowing new construction in historic districts without a discretionary hearing where no contributing structure is altered and Washington requiring owner consent for most new designations on residential parcels.
- Reform approval processes so electric vehicle (EV) chargers and outdoor dining can be deployed at scale. The city has a goal of rolling out 10,000 EV chargers by 2030, but as of January 2026, the city had installed only 92 curbside chargers while EV registrations grew 14% year over year. Part of what is holding us back is that the charter requires a revocable consent (a formal OK from the City that can be taken back anytime) for streetside chargers, or any private object put in the public right of way. The problem for EV charger companies, according to testimony provided to last year’s charter revision commission, is that while the company works with building owners to access their spare electricity on a compensated basis, it is the building owner and not the charger company who must apply for the revocable consent, which introduces a high barrier of complexity for deploying at scale. The revocable consent regime is inconsistent in other areas too. Sidewalk cafes are exempt from standard revocable consent review while roadway dining is not, illustrating the inconsistent ways we manage public space. The permanent Dining Out NYC program for outdoor dining requires a revocable consent and a license, which could take five months or more to approve. An amendment could allow for citywide permits for routine infrastructure in the public right of way and introduce more consistency in the case-by-case revocable consent process for sidewalk and in-street dining. Other cities have moved faster on EV chargers by decoupling charging from property ownership. Portland adopted a right-of-way policy in 2023 that lets companies install curbside chargers under a master lease—one permit per site — and Seattle has run a similar pilot.
We are excited about the work COGE is undertaking. The commission does not have much time — proposals must be ready by the end of July to make the November ballot. Still, if there is more work to do, the commission can continue its work through next year (which we hope they do). Given the potential for impact on the lives of real New Yorkers, we hope this commission remains ambitious.
