Assessing the proposed City Charter revision ballot measures
For the Mamdani administration, making New York’s vast bureaucracy work better has been a consistent and concerted campaign. A little more than six months in, the mayor has launched a number of admirable efforts, including a SPEED task force to accelerate housing development, Public Interest Technology crews to overhaul agency operations and a push this week to streamline small business regulations. Such measures are particularly important when paired with the mayor’s expansive, expensive plans to increase the reach of government, including a more comprehensive early childcare system.
Mamdani’s Commission on Government Efficiency, which this week proposed meaningful changes to what is effectively the City’s constitution, continues in the same vein. The commission will vote on the recommendations on Thursday, and approved proposals will appear on the November ballot. Although the commission’s work was rushed and its charge limited, it started an important citywide conversation about the nuts and bolts of government.
Still, close analysis of the commission’s proposals underscores that if this essential work is a New York City marathon, Mamdani remains in Brooklyn on the third or fourth mile of the race. The hard work of improving local governance requires more imagination and ambition than pruning back overgrown procedures. And the great majority of the work will lie less in changing the charter than in re-orienting the everyday work of City agencies to focus relentlessly on performance, and in the process tune up both the effectiveness and the efficiency of government.
The Commission report recognizes that government “cannot seem to get out of its own way,” and its five draft ballot measures are worthy as far as they go. But many could have achieved greater efficiencies. And one significant reform to city government will not be put before voters in November at all.
Taken one by one:
- Restaurants and public space advocates asked to speed up approval for outdoor dining by removing it from the “revocable consent” system, under which the City grants a business individually negotiated permission to occupy a stretch of sidewalk or roadway — permission the City can withdraw at any time. Getting one takes months. The first ballot measure helpfully proposes streamlining it — but stops short of moving outdoor dining onto standard permit footing, leaving restaurateurs with a bespoke arrangement they can’t fully count on.
- The second question focuses on the City’s expensive and time-consuming procurement process, including by tailoring onerous vendor questionnaires to the size of the contract or business, requiring the board that writes contracting rules to meet and allowing agencies doing the buying to handle certain approvals now routed through the mayor’s office. All that amounts to real improvement. But it does not include possible solutions for other major complaints about delay and payment, for example, time limits for registering contracts or enforceable standards for paying vendors on time, which seem necessary to alter the City’s behavior. The Commission said the City has promised to adopt some related measures outside the charter, but that leaves them vulnerable to changes from administration to administration.
- Street safety is arguably the arena where the Commission most closely rose to the city’s needs. The third question proposes streamlining the process for street redesigns and seems likely to expedite roadway improvements and save lives. And it includes another smart measure no hearing witness asked for: letting the City sell the unused development rights above landmarked buildings like courthouses and libraries through the expedited review process the Council recently granted to every property owner, save the City itself. Together with sales of small surplus lots, this would raise a projected $200 million.
- Housing advocates, on the other hand, have reason for disappointment in Question 4. They asked to make the Department of Buildings the city’s single permitting authority, consolidating approvals now scattered across more than a dozen agencies. Instead, COGE settled chiefly for proposing a shared website on which builders can apply for permits in one place, with every agency retaining the power to review and approve on its own schedule. This was helpful but not especially bold, leaving too much bureaucracy unaltered.
- And the rainy day fund target called for by the Commission in its Question 5 — with a target 12% of tax revenue and a deposit methodology written by the very entity (the mayor’s own budget office) that it means to constrain — is a step forward but falls short of the more prudent 16% target that history shows is necessary to cover full revenue losses during a recession.
To be clear, all five proposals would deliver meaningful gains to New Yorkers who expect the gears of their government to turn with reasonable speed, and therefore merit approval by the Commission and then passage by voters. The Commission members deserve praise for their work; the perfect ought not be the enemy of the good. But Vital City will press the Mamdani administration to continue improving government effectiveness with all the levers at their disposal.
The types of ideas Vital City’s Just Fix It project would like to see the administration embrace include those floated in our published roundtable of government veterans and scholars. Primary among them is for the government to be guided by performance and results, not mere activity or “counting” metrics as is too often the case today with the Mayor’s Management Report. That also means a mechanism for relentless accountability, in the same way that the city’s police department so many years ago paired new measurements of crime with a departmentwide management structure, Compstat. A city can approve, permit and procure at twice the speed and still not know whether its programs are serving the needs of its residents.
We also support a commitment to work with the State (who exercises much of the control) to fix a civil service system that makes hiring employees exhausting, time-consuming and discouraging of top talent; creating an independent body like the Congressional Budget Office to score the fiscal impact of legislation before it passes; and starting budgeting from evidence of what works rather than last year's baseline. That kind of thinking will not be on the ballot in November.
Not least, the reform urged by more COGE hearing witnesses than any other — opening up closed and generally low-turnout mayoral primaries so that all of the city’s voters can have a say in the electoral contests that tend to be decisive — is not among the proposed ballot measures. While a move to open, nonpartisan primaries would have ultimately required Albany’s approval, it is unquestionably the type of proposal that ought to be put to voters, as it bears directly on how they pick their leaders. The same cannot be said of every other ballot question. Open primaries would have allowed more New Yorkers to take part in the electoral process, making local government more accountable to the people. It is a shame the City missed this opportunity.
