Voting on term limits....again

From the NY Times:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg will not be on the ballot in 2010, but the issue that many New Yorkers lambasted him over in the 2009 election very likely will be: term limits.

“We need as a commission to be heard this November,” Matthew Goldstein, the chairman of the New York City Charter Revision Commission, said on Monday night, during a hearing at Brooklyn Borough Hall.

Asked afterward to elaborate, Mr. Goldstein, who is the chancellor of the City University of New York, said, “I haven’t heard any commissioner opine that we ought to pass in November about term limits.”

The statement was hardly a surprise. After all, when Mr. Bloomberg decided in the fall of 2008 to upend the city’s term limits law (which had been approved twice by voters) to give him and other city officials a chance at a third term, he promised that a charter commission would revisit the issue. And when Mr. Bloomberg appointed the 15-member panel in March, Mr. Goldstein said that term limits would be one of many issues on the table.

Still, Mr. Goldstein’s comments represented the most definitive statement yet that term limits would be on the ballot this year — as opposed to next year or even in 2012, as some people have suggested. Mr. Goldstein also indicated that the commission was far from a consensus about what the term limits ballot question would be:

For example, should voters be asked to return to the old system of limiting city officials to two terms? Should voters be asked to make three four-year terms the standard? Should voters be asked to consider a multi-tiered system of term limits, like two terms for the mayor, and three for the City Council members and other officials? Or should any plebiscites be legally protected, so that future City Councils that wanted to emulate the actions of the “Bloomberg 29″ (as the Council members who voted to extend term limits in 2008 were derided by critics) would be barred from doing so?