Meet the new community boards! (Same as the old community boards!)

The NYC Charter Revision Commission has issued some recommendations that should be on the ballot this November. If adopted, they will impose the following on community boards:

Term limits

 Provide a limit of four consecutive full two-year terms for community board members, provided, however, that for purposes of staggered implementation, certain initial appointments may include a limit of five two-year terms;

 Establish that the four-term limit would become effective for appointments or reappointments beginning on or after April 1, 2019; and

 Establish that community board members who had previously served for four consecutive terms are not barred from re-appointment after one full term out of office

So in summary, the dinosaurs that have been on the board for 30 years will likely get another 10. There's also a whole lot of gobbledygook about a Civic Engagement Commission which just sounds like an unnecessary government expansion.

All hail democracy!

Speaker candidate wants term limits extended...again

From the Daily News:

A candidate for City Council speaker has drafted a bill to extend term limits for the Council to three terms.

Councilman Jumaane Williams plans to introduce the legislation by the end of the year to allow Council members to serve three four-year terms instead of the current two, if voters approve the idea in a referendum.

Williams is among eight candidates running for Council speaker — all of whom have said they’d support giving their fellow pols a third term.

“This is only about what’s best for the city and best for good government,” said Williams (D-Brooklyn), who plans to release the bill Monday as part of a broader proposal outlining his plans for the speakership.

The legislation would allow three terms for the Council, while keeping the max at two for the mayor, public advocate, controller and borough presidents.

It would take effect if voters ratified it at the ballot box during the next general election after a vote by the Council for the measure.

Doesn't the process for getting referendum items on the ballot require a large signature gathering operation? If the people vote yes on the measure, then it becomes law. No city council intervention is required. However, no one is collecting signatures to get term limit extensions on the ballot because...the people already voted for 2 terms 3 times.

Sounds like a ploy for votes from colleagues.

Council Members in favor of term limits - for community board members

From the Times Ledger:

Queens activists and lawmakers are divided over a bill from City Councilman Daniel Dromm (D-Jackson Heights) that would institute term limits for community boards.

The bill, introduced in December, states that starting April 1, 2016, community board members cannot serve more than six consecutive two-year terms. The bill would not apply to current board members. Members are currently appointed by the borough presidents and City Council members.

There was a joint hearing for the bill by the governmental operations and general welfare committees May 11.

The bill has been heard and is under consideration to be heard by the full Council, according to a spokeswoman for City Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan), chairman of the governmental operations committee.

Supporters of the bill say term limits would help make community boards more representative of their communities and prevent a few people from dominating the boards.

“I feel that communities change and I feel that community boards need to reflect the changes in communities,” Dromm said.

City Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras (D-East Elmhurst), one of the bill’s co-sponsors, agreed.

“I sponsored Council member Dromm’s legislation to limit the term of community board members to protect our democracy,” Ferreras said in a statement. “Many elected officials are term limited for the same reason. As communities evolve, so should their representa­tives.”

Opponents of the bill feel that term limits would take experienced members off the boards. They argue that incompetent members could easily be removed.

If you believe in term limits, then remove the people who have stayed too long. Problem solved. (It's funny, but Danny has no problem removing people who have only served one term who disagree with him.)

Also, in many neighborhoods, no one wants to be on the community boards so there's no point in removing people and having a board with empty seats.

Will term limits improve community board process?

From the Gotham Gazette:

At a hearing of the City Council's Committee on Governmental Operations Thursday, issues of community board function will be taken up through bills to introduce term limits for board members and to add professional urban planners to board staff.

The term-limit bill, introduced by Council Member Daniel Dromm in December last year, would allow community board appointees to serve up to six consecutive two-year terms. Currently, there is no limit on how many terms a community board member can serve. The bill, co-sponsored by Council Member Ben Kallos, who chairs the government operations committee, would enact the six-term limit starting for members appointed in April 2016.

The bill provides exemption for current board members who would be grandfathered along current no-limit rules. Community board members are appointed by borough presidents; there are 59 boards in the five boroughs.

"This is just one of the areas in which community boards should be reformed," said Lauren George, associate director of good government group Common Cause New York. "In terms of increasing representation, this will be a big step in improving the way community boards represent the changing dynamics of the city. When experienced members basically get a lifetime membership, they tend to have entrenched interests. They don't reflect the neighborhood, age and ethnic diversity, or sometimes even gender diversity."

George also said recruitment to community boards is extremely challenging, which is especially true in certain parts of the city, and term limits could encourage new people to join.

Danny Dromm wants community board term limits

From an Op Ed by Danny Dromm:

In the City Council, members are limited to two four-year terms. Why shouldn’t community board members also face term limits? For all the same reasons I believe in term limits for elected officials, I believe in term limits for community board members.

When term limits was first instituted in the City Council people predicted the city would fall apart especially because we had just suffered the tragedy of 9/11. But that didn’t happen and the new City Council got us through the crisis.

Please bookmark this for when Danny runs for his third term (he's grandfathered in because of when he was originally elected).

Community board term limit bill doesn't do much

From Gotham Gazette:

The New York City Council will once again see a bill on term limits introduced, although this one is not likely to be as controversial as the last time.

On Wednesday Council Members Danny Dromm and Ben Kallos will introduce legislation to impose a six-term limit for members of Community Boards, capping tenure at 12 years. Currently, community board members can serve as many two-year terms as they wish, so long as they continue to be approved by their respective borough president.

"Communities change and I believe Community Boards should change also," Council Member Dromm said by phone Tuesday evening. "I applaud those people who spend 30 or 40 years on a Community Board, and I thank them for service. But I do think we need to move things around."

The bill would not affect members currently on the boards, only those elected to a first term on April 1, 2016 or after.

So the same evil people and dead weight currently appointed will continue to serve indefinitely. Fantastic job, gentlemen!

Rush job at the Times Ledger?

It appears that someone was sloppy at the Times Ledger. If I ran the Avery campaign, I'd request a correction.

Here's the original article.

Community board term limit resolution introduced

From the Queens Chronicle:

A resolution wending its way though the City Council could send a seismic wave through community boards throughout the borough.

Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan) wants borough presidents and Council members who make appointments to limit them to five consecutive terms; set term limits for board and committee chairmanships; and use things like meeting attendance and committee participation to end the practice of automatic reappointment.

His proposal also seeks to ban the appointment of executive board members of political parties or people serving on the staffs of elected officials.

Resolution 164 has 10 co-sponsors, including Danny Dromm (D-Jackson Heights), Peter Koo (D-Flushing) and Antonio Reynoso (Brooklyn, Queens).

A resolution doesn't do squat. You need to change the city charter.

State pols not too keen on term limits

From the Times Ledger:

After campaigning his way to Albany on pledges to push for longer legislative terms and limiting lawmakers’ time in office, state Sen. Tony Avella (D-Bayside) said he made headway on his first state bill, which would extend legislators’ terms to four years, by joining the Independent Democratic Conference.

Avella joined the IDC, a breakaway group of Democrats that controls the Senate through a coalition with Republicans, Feb. 26.

On March 11, the Rules Committee moved a measure extending state lawmakers’ terms from two to four years, which Avella said he introduced shortly after getting elected to the Senate four years ago.

“The fact that it passed the Rules Committee is very significant because it could come up for a vote at any moment,” Avella said, noting that he attributed the measure’s progress to him signing onto the IDC. “It would not have come up otherwise.”

But a companion bill Avella introduced calling for the implementation of 16-year term limits for legislators stalled. A revised version cutting term limits to 12 years or three consecutive terms — whichever is longer — has not fared well either, sputtering in the Judiciary Committee since being drafted in 2013.

“There is a little more discussion this session than there has been in the past,” Avella said. “Term limits is a harder lift because the members have to, in fact, agree to term limits.”

Since most enjoy being senators for life, why would they agree to that?

Pataki calls for state & federal term limits

From the Huffington Post:

Former New York Gov. George Pataki (R) criticized Washington politicians who seek to “stay here forever and say nothing” in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s "Street Smart" on Tuesday.

“One of the worst things about people getting elected to Washington is once they get there, they want to stay there,” Pataki said.

The former three-term governor recalled the advice of a fellow Republican during his first week as a New York state assemblyman as he criticized the complacent attitudes and self-serving priorities of perennial lawmakers:

"I remember when I got elected to the state assembly, the first week I’m there, I’m standing up saying some stupid thing and the guy next to me, Republican, goes, ‘You know, Pataki, if you stay here, sit down and keep your head down, you could stay here forever.’ I was thinking, is that what I want to do? Stay here forever and say nothing? But I honestly think that’s the mentality of many in Washington: priority number one, getting reelected; priority number two, being in the majority; priority number three, doing what’s right for the people. That is wrong."

Pataki suggested keeping congressional term limits short -- eight years for House members and 12 years for senators -- and advised politicians retiring from public office to “go home” instead of furthering their political careers as lobbyists or consultants.

“We never had the concept of 'we have a political class that is our rulers, and then we have the public' -- and yet that’s the way it is,” Pataki said. “We have a permanent political class, whether they’re in office, or they leave public office, they stay in Washington and they dictate our lives. It’s not the way America is supposed to work, and it’s wrong.”

Quinn not forgiven for extending term limits

From the Daily News:

In an office near New York City Hall, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn convened a secret meeting of key Council members to discuss a poll she had quietly commissioned.

It asked voters whether they would support revising the city’s term-limits law in a popular vote. The results — for those in the room — were not good: the issue was a nonstarter.

Quinn “did everything she could to let us down easy,” someone who was there recalled this week. “With the poll, she was letting us know it would be impossible.”

That meeting was held in 2006. Yet two years later, Quinn would lead the council in joining with Mayor Michael Bloomberg to repeal term limits — through legislation, rather than a citywide vote.

And today, the results of that poll seem prescient.

Once the overwhelming frontrunner, Quinn nears the Sept. 10 Democratic primary for mayor struggling to reach the expected runoff. And no issue seems more responsible for hurting her candidacy than her decision to help Bloomberg win a third term.

It comes up nearly every day.

Term limits and temper come back to bite Quinn in the ass

From the NY Times:

In the Bayside section of Queens, a volunteer had barely begun her sales pitch for Christine C. Quinn’s mayoral campaign when the middle-aged man who answered the door cut her off. “She was the one responsible, in the City Council, for giving Bloomberg a third term,” he barked. “I hold that against her.”

The volunteer calmly countered that it was New Yorkers, not Ms. Quinn, who “voted the mayor back in.”

In Astoria, Queens, a woman in her 30s told another Quinn volunteer that the candidate’s sometimes brash personality had rubbed her the wrong way.

The volunteer gamely explained that Ms. Quinn’s flashes of temper “come from a place of love and passion.”

For all its financial might and political firepower, Ms. Quinn’s once high-flying bid for mayor has suddenly plummeted back to earth, shedding its coveted front-runner status and foreclosing the possibility of a painless path to City Hall. So with two months left in an increasingly unpredictable Democratic primary, she is dispatching a volunteer army unlike any in the race to every corner of New York City, determined not just to promote her campaign, but also to systematically ferret out and rebut voters’ reservations and resentments toward her.

Losers, all

From the Daily News:

Unleashing passions that still burn today, the City Council voted in 2008 to allow New York officials to run for three terms in office, rather than just the two terms that voters have repeatedly commanded.

This history has placed 10 incumbents in position to run for third terms this November. They are doing so in clear violation of the public will. Worse, five of the defiant 10 are members who actually voted against allowing officials to seek three terms.

The five members who voted for the extension and are defying the subsequent will of the voters are: Maria del Carmen Arroyo and Jimmy Vacca of the Bronx; Brooklynites Sara Gonzalez and Darlene Mealy, and Inez Dickens of Manhattan.

The five hypocrites who voted against allowing members to run three times but are doing so now are: Dan Garodnick, Melissa Mark-Viverito and Rosie Mendez of Manhattan; Vincent Gentile of Brooklyn, and Annabel Palma from the Bronx.

Once, they told their constituents that the city was best served by injecting fresh blood after eight years. Now, breaking their bond, they serve only political ambition.

Quinn attacked for extending term limits

From the Daily News:

The Brooklyn crowd erupted in boos Wednesday night when frontrunner Quinn fielded a question about having helped pave the way for Mayor Bloomberg to seek and win another four years in office.

Quinn spoke calmly over the jeers: “I believed it was the right decision… I respect that many folks disagree with that.”

Democrats often use the term-limits controversy to bash Quinn as uncomfortably close to Bloomberg. It's a perception some observers say has encouraged Quinn to demonstrate her independence before the primary without alienating Hizzoner or his fans in November.

When asked Wednesday, she refused to pledge not to overturn a voter referendum if elected mayor.

The speaker's primary foes -- former Councilman Sal Albanese, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, Comptroller John Liu and ex-Comptroller Bill Thompson -- all said they would not scuttle a referendum.

And the mayor thinks Christine is just peachy.

Rory comes roaring back

From The Politicker:

Assemblyman Rory Lancman, who lost a Democratic primary to Congresswoman-elect Grace Meng earlier this year and declined to run for reelection, now has his sights set on a new chamber of elected office: New York City Council.

“There’s a tremendous turnover in city government next year, including the City Council itself,” Mr. Lancman told us yesterday afternoon. “So I think there’s a real opportunity for someone with experience and energy to have a big impact in shaping the city in the next 4 to 8 years. That’s something that this time didn’t really exist for me in the State Assembly but will in the City Council. It’s exciting to be a part of it.”

Mr. Lancman intends to run for term-limited Councilman Jim Gennaro’s seat in eastern Queens. And, unlike his congressional campaign where the local Democratic establishment had aligned against him, they appear to be fully at his back this time around, at least if his campaign kickoff invitation is any indication. The event is headlined by the borough’s Democratic chairman, Rep. Joe Crowley, while Ms. Meng and a plethora of local elected officials are members of the host committee. Also included are representatives from a number of labor heavyweights, including UFT, RWDSU, SEIU 32BJ, SEIU Local 199, Hotel Trades Council and more.

Should Albany have term limits?

From the Daily News:

Assembly approval of a taxpayer-funded settlement in the Vito Lopez sexual harassment scandal has spurred a renewed push to limit how long a lawmaker can serve as a legislative leader or a committee chair. 

Sen. Joseph Griffo (R-Utica) and Assemblywoman Sandra Galef (D-Westchester) want to revisit an earlier bill that would cap at 12 years the time one could serve as Assembly speaker, Senate majority leader or a minority leader. Committee chairmanships would be restricted to eight-year stints. 

“It’s a good time to look it,” Galef said, noting that the allegations against Assemblyman Lopez have brought the issue to the public’s attention. “It could be that people look at it differently now.” 

The bill was previously bottled up in committee. 

The Senate already has a rule that limits a majority leader to eight years, which is four terms. The Assembly has no limits on leadership tenure.

Hit the road, Jack

From the NY Times:

New Yorkers are having second thoughts about Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s third term.

As for a fourth term? No thanks.

With less than 18 months to go in Mr. Bloomberg’s unexpectedly long mayoral tenure, nearly three-quarters of New Yorkers said he should not have been allowed to run for a third term, according to the latest poll by The New York Times.

Mr. Bloomberg, having persuaded the City Council to approve a change in term limits that paved the way for his re-election in 2009, has presided over city government for more than a decade, and he still gets solid grades. Forty-eight percent of the poll’s respondents approved of his job performance, and 39 percent disapproved, about the same as a year ago.

But asked if they would support Mr. Bloomberg, a political independent, in a hypothetical bid for a fourth four-year stint in City Hall, 65 percent of New Yorkers said they would not vote for the mayor again. One-quarter of voters would vote for him to stay on, and 8 percent said “it depends.” (The mayor, who is 70, has said he has no plans to run again.)

Quinn should return campaign money

From the Daily News:

Legislation passed in 2007, Local Law 34, lowered the maximum political contributions from those doing business with the city to $400. But due to a loophole, officeholders like Quinn could hold on to the maximum $4,950 donations from those doing business with the city received under earlier rules.

In the spirit of making local citywide elections more transparent, Local Law 34 also established a database intended to prevent even the appearance of a link between governmental decisions and large campaign contributions. This new law was designed to hinder, if not end, the age-old, transactional “pay-to-play” politics that had favored the few for so long at the expense of the many.

But the Council, led by Quinn, ended up subverting the intention of this law — by not making it retroactive.

Why would the Council allow incumbents to keep money received under limits it judged to be more than 10 times too high, potentially undermining this good- government reform?

I smell a rat here. The speaker gave herself and anyone else lucky enough to have raised lots of money under those old rules a huge head start in the 2013 mayoral race.

I used the database set up by the law — and Quinn’s public disclosures — to find at least $250,000 in campaign funds she has raised for this election cycle under the old rules.

He got what he wanted, so who cares?

From the NY Times:

Michael R. Bloomberg was testifying this month about his diamond-encrusted campaigns, but he might as well have been talking about the balky state of his mayoral enterprise after 10 years.

The mayor likes to insist that he was de facto drafted for a third term, that City Council members and corporate worthies pulled at his hem, begging him to overturn term limits and run again. “A number of people kept coming to me and asking if it were possible,” the mayor also testified. No doubt some importuned. But many, not least his own aides, counseled against it.

A third term is a politician’s Death Valley. It’s a land of the lost in which third-stringers are press-ganged into becoming first-stringers, midlevel managers space out as you talk, and City Council members start to talk back. Not to mention that miscreants and consultants often grab for what is not legitimately theirs.

And true to historical form, very little has gone swimmingly for our potentate in chief. He purchased a third term at not inconsiderable personal cost — he spent a tidy $105 million on his re-election — and now his headaches proliferate.

Mayor Moneybags and his "missing" money

From the NY Post:

There always has been something very strange about the Manhattan trial involving $1.2 million of Mayor Moneybags’ fortune, but it is entirely consistent with his weird third term. If Bloomberg ever wants to spot the day it all started to go downhill, he should revisit Oct. 23, 2008.

That’s the day he invited a black cloud to dog him by getting 29 dimwits on the City Council to change the term-limits law. He was all for a limit of two terms -- until he realized there wasn’t a chance in hell he wasn’t going to be elected president that year. Suddenly, he liked the job he had so much, he decided to keep it.

First, he would have to renege on a promise never to fight the law, then round up enough council quislings so he could seek a third term. It’s amazing what money can buy.

He got what he wanted, but his victory increasingly looks like a curse. Blame the cloud.

Rocked by scandals, snowstorms and a diminished legacy, Bloomberg now faces the indignity of having to explain publicly, and under oath, something he tried to keep secret. He and his campaign team are spinning like tops as they try to make the $1.2 million payment to the Independence Party seem honest.

It wasn’t. It was designed to be hidden from the public and the campaign-disclosure rules.

It also had an unsavory intent. Defense lawyers convincingly argued on the first day of the trial that Bloomberg made the payment secretly because he was embarrassed about its purpose.

Part of the reason he's not ranking so high these days.