What Mayor Mamdani’s COGE might accomplish — and why changing the charter has become so common and so complicated
Last week was a big one for the New York City Charter Revision Commissions — that’s “Commissions” plural. On Wednesday night, the Commission created by then-Mayor Eric Adams on his final day in office formally approved a charter amendment, to be placed on the November ballot, that would, if approved by the voters, authorize open primaries — that is, primaries in which all voters, regardless of party enrollment, may participate — in elections for City offices. However, moments before the Commission acted, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, exercising the power granted to him by the state legislature in the just-enacted state budget, rescinded that Commission and nullified its proposals.
Then, on Thursday, Mamdani announced the creation of his own 15-member charter revision commission, dubbed the Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE) in satiric homage to you-know-what (if you don’t know what, it’s DOGE, Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s infamous wrecking ball aimed at the federal bureaucracy). Mamdani’s COGE, which is scheduled to hold its first public meeting this week, is charged with reviewing the City Charter to “remov[e] bureaucratic barriers that slow infrastructure projects and delay services; [equip] City agencies the authority, enforcement tools, and flexibility they need to deliver programs effectively; and [modernize] government to improve efficiency and saving, reserve, and budget practices.”
(As long as we are counting charter revision commissions, there is also a third dangling out there — the City Council-created “NYC Commission to Strengthen Local Democracy,” which last summer adopted a package of proposed charter changes but, because of the actions of yet another Adams charter revision commission, was unable to get them on the ballot for voter consideration. That Commission has been quiet since last summer and its proposals are likely to be bumped from the ballot again this year by Mandani’s COGE, since a mayoral commission always takes precedence over a charter-authorized one.)
So, what is a charter revision commission? Why are there so many of them? How was Mayor Adams able to create one as he was walking out the door? And what happens now with Mamdani’s commission?
The New York City Charter is the constitution of New York City. First adopted in 1897 and revised and amended many times since, it creates the major offices and institutions of City government — the mayor, comptroller, public advocate, the Council, the borough presidents, major city agencies — and lays out their powers. It establishes the rules for adopting the City’s capital and operating budgets, zoning and land use regulation, procurement and local legislative process.
Compared to the United States or New York State Constitutions, the Charter is relatively easy to amend through the regular local legislative process — meaning, action of the City Council, with mayoral approval. However, state law provides that charter changes that affect the powers of elected officials require voter approval. Those more significant charter changes can be prepared through ordinary legislation, but they also often come from charter revision commissions.
What Charter Revision Commissions used to be
Although the Charter can be amended without a commission, state law also authorizes the creation of charter revision commissions — typically the time for more ambitious reimaginings of how city government might work.
A commission can be created by the City Council, from a voter initiative, or by the mayor, with mayoral commissions by far the most common. State law provides that a mayoral charter revision shall consist of nine to 15 city residents, handpicked by the mayor, who also designates the chair. The commission is supposed to “review the entire charter of the city” and recommend such changes as it considers appropriate, which can take effect only if approved by the voters. Any proposal has to be ready for the voters 60 days before election day, and the commission has until the second general election after it has been created to complete its work. In other words, Mamdani’s COGE has until the end of August if it wants to put proposals on the ballot this year, but can also continue work through the summer of 2027 to put proposals before the voters in November 2027. That’s a pretty long tenure as these things go.
Historically, charter revision commissions were used to prepare major changes to the structure of city government. The 1897 Charter creating Greater New York, the 1938 replacement of the Board of Aldermen with the Council, the strengthening of the mayor’s role in the budget and land use process in 1961 and the 1987-89 abolition of the Board of Estimate and the redistribution of its powers across City government were all the work of Charter Revision Commissions. As these dates indicate, for most of New York City’s history, charter revision was a once-in-a-generation process, responding to the felt need for wholesale reworkings in the structure of City government, or, as with the 1987-89 commission, the powerful outside pressure posed by the Supreme Court’s invalidation of the Board of Estimate.
The new politics of Charter revision
That all began to change as the 20th century turned into the 21st. While there were no more than a half-dozen charter revision commissions (including one created by the state) between 1897 and 1997, since 1998 there have been 14 charter revision commissions, 12 created by the mayor — or, on average, one commission every other year. Some of these have proposed significant changes to city government — like the adoption of ranked-choice voting in 2019 (proposed by a Council commission) and last year’s reform of the Uniform Land Review Process (ULURP) to speed up housing production — although not of the same scale as the abolition of the Board of Estimate. Others, like the 2022 proposal to adopt a statement of values as a preamble in the Charter, or the 2024 measure to expand the Department of Sanitation’s powers to clean all City property, were trivial and could easily have been adopted through the ordinary legislative process without a charter revision commission or voter approval.
What accounts for this explosion of charter revision commissions? Growing conflict between the mayor and council, exacerbated by a not-so-secret weapon state law gives the mayor — the power to “bump” Council proposals or voter-initiated measures from the ballot. Under state law, if a mayoral charter revision commission submits a charter amendment for voter approval, no other question can be submitted to the voters at that election. Mayor Rudy Giuliani was the first to use this bumping power in 1998. Giuliani wanted to use taxpayer funds to relocate the New York Yankees from the Bronx to a new stadium on Manhattan’s West Side. The Council tried to block this with a local law, passed over Giuliani’s veto, that would have asked the voters to adopt a ban on the use of public funds to build the stadium. To bump the stadium referendum, Giuliani created a charter revision commission, which wound up placing a number of campaign finance reforms on the November 1998 ballot.
Giuliani used his bumping power again in 1999 to block a voter-initiated campaign finance reform proposal, creating a new commission in June 1999 that proposed multiple changes that would generally have strengthened the mayor’s power over the budget. The 1999 Giuliani commission’s proposals were rejected by the voters, but accomplished his goal of blocking the grassroots campaign finance reform measure.
Mayor Mike Bloomberg also deployed the charter-revision-commission bumping power, against a grassroots initiative opposing the Iraq War in 2002 and another voter initiative to amend the charter to mandate strict caps on public school class sizes in 2003. Mayor Adams’ 2024 commission — the one that expanded the Sanitation Department’s powers — was also rushed into existence to block a Council measure that would have expanded its power to approve or reject mayoral appointments of commissioners. The 2025 Commission also blocked a City Council commission’s recommendations from the ballot.
Beyond bumping specific Council or grassroots proposals, mayors have used charter commissions to push their political agendas and leapfrog a potentially hostile City Council by getting their policy and government reform proposals directly to the voters.
Where do we go from here?
The Adams-Mamdani commission tango sets new standards for the political use of charter commissions. Although nothing in state law addresses the timing of the mayor’s creation of a charter revision commission, Adams is the only mayor to have created a charter revision commission consisting entirely of his appointees as he was leaving office. With no love apparently lost between the outgoing and incoming mayors, Adams’ commission could have handicapped his successor in two ways. First, any charter amendment it would have proposed would probably bump any Mamdani charter proposals from the ballot. Although state law does not address the prospect of dueling charter commissions by different mayors operating simultaneously, there is reason to believe that the Adams commission proposals, if prepared first, would benefit from the law’s preference for mayoral commissions. Second, the Adams commission’s directive to consider open primaries is a direct attack on Mamdani’s political strength — the growing power of the highly motivated ideological left that enabled him to dominate in the Democratic primary. Opening the primary to non-Democrats — including more centrist independents and Republicans — could make the mayor more vulnerable to a reelection challenger.
Not only was Adams’s lame duck action unprecedented, so, too, was Mamdani’s rescission of it. When he acted, Adams appeared to have given Mamdani a fait accompli. While the law did not contemplate the situation Adams created, neither did it give Mamdani the power to remove or replace charter commissioners (although he could fill vacancies) or to cancel the commission. He could starve it of city funds, but the commission signaled it would raise private funds. In the end, Albany came to the rescue, with a new law, part of the state budget, written for the occasion, providing that when a charter commission is created between election day and the end of the year, its “continued existence” is dependent on “confirmation by the mayor in office” during the first six months of the following year. Failure to obtain confirmation — which Mamdani delivered last week — causes the commission to expire and nullifies its proposals.
Members of the Adams commission have signaled they intend to fight their termination, but it is unclear what legal recourse they have. We are probably back to just two commissions — Mamdani’s COGE and the in-limbo Council commission.
It is not yet clear what parts of the Charter the COGE intends to tackle, although from the mayor’s announcement of the commission it seems likely it will look at budget and fiscal issues, the process for approving capital projects, how the city delivers services and city agency powers. It remains to be seen whether COGE will live up to its promise of serious Charter change. But it has already accomplished its political purpose of blocking any charter initiative by the Council or anyone else.
