New York – New York City Panel Eyeing Rollback of Term Limits

New York – The commission appointed by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to review the city’s constitution and put possible changes on the ballot this year is considering the option of rolling back term limits to two terms.

The panel released a report Friday outlining ideas it wants to examine in the next several weeks. The process includes a series of hearings to gather comment from the public before deciding by early September what issues to put before voters in November.

Besides term limits changes, the report recommends examining the idea of instant runoff voting in New York City primaries. The process, which is done in several other major cities including San Francisco and Minneapolis, lets voters rank their preference of candidates, eliminating the need for costly runoffs.

The panel did not take a position on the idea of nonpartisan elections, which Bloomberg supports and had hoped to get on the ballot. The commission studied the idea but did not recommend putting the question before voters this year.

Lorna Goodman, the commission’s executive director, said the difficulty has been choosing issues that can be fully studied and prepared in time for the election. The group only began its work in the spring.

“We expect that some of the staff’s recommendations will pass the test of the summer’s debate and others may be left on the table for future action,” she wrote in the report.

Term limits is the chief issue that voters expect to be on the ballot this year, the commission said.

In 2008, Bloomberg hastily persuaded the City Council to change the term-limits law so that he could run for a third, four-year term.

The move came after voters had twice approved term limits in the 1990s by referendum, and led to voter dissatisfaction that hurt the billionaire mayor at the polls. He won by fewer than five points, despite spending more than $100 million of his own fortune on his campaign.

Among the possible changes the panel is examining is to roll back the three terms to the two-term limit the city had previously. Another option would be to give citywide officials, like the mayor, comptroller and public advocate, two terms while letting City Council members have three.

The panel’s report also poses the idea of an amendment that would prohibit the City Council from changing the term-limits law to benefit incumbents voting on the proposal. It was a popular sentiment at the public hearings held by the commission this spring.

“This has already been twice determined by the people’s vote,” Barbara Glassman, a Queens resident, said at a hearing in April. “The charter should firmly prohibit the overturning of legitimate election results by a governing body or person.”

The panel had said it would release its report early afternoon Friday, but delayed it without explanation until late in the day, when it was sure to get little attention ahead of a Monday public hearing to discuss the recommendations.

The report was compiled after two phases of citywide public hearings that began this spring.

The first round gathered general public comments and concerns, and another set of hearings focused on specific issues, term limits, voter participation, government structure, public integrity and land use.

The city’s charter is more than 350 pages long, the product of state laws, City Council laws, petitions and adopted proposals of 12 earlier charter review commissions.

New York City got its first charter after the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx were consolidated in 1898. Before that, it was governed by colonial charters and then state charter.

The last charter review was in 2005. Voters approved both referendum questions, one that created an ethics code for administrative judges and one that established certain fiscal duties for the city.