New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ office is pushing back against an effort by state lawmakers to rescind a mayor’s power to block ballot proposals from reaching voters.
At issue is a bill the state Legislature approved last week that would prevent mayors across New York from “bumping” proposals off local ballots by appointing charter review commissions to make their own proposals.
The legislation would eliminate a legal tactic that critics have accused Adams and several of his predecessors of using to derail ballot questions the mayors find objectionable. That includes last year, when Adams effectively blocked an effort to require City Council approval for his agency commissioners, and in the late 1990s, when then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani blocked a proposal that would have prohibited city money from going to a new Yankee Stadium.
”The balance of power was unchecked and unbalanced,” said Assemblymember Tony Simone, a Manhattan Democrat who sponsored the bill. “We wanted to balance the power.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul has not said whether she supports the measure. Adams and an organization representing mayors across the state are hoping Hochul vetoes the bill, arguing that the current law is meant to prevent having multiple proposals about the same issue on the ballot.
"It is deeply disturbing that state officials are attempting to bypass governing processes they were elected to uphold — by trying to pass a bill without committee discussions, public hearings, or input from municipal or local elected officials — simply to score political points,” Adams spokesperson Liz Garcia said in a statement.
The bill, which has been around in various forms since at least 2005, would make changes to the state’s municipal home-rule law. The current law lays out the ways a city’s charter — or constitution — can be changed.
Both the council and mayor of any given city can create a charter revision commission to recommend changes requiring approval by voters. But if both the mayor and city council create a commission, the mayor’s commission takes precedence — essentially “bumping” the council-created commission’s proposals from the ballot.
Local voters can also circulate petitions to change a city charter. Either 30,000 voter signatures or 10% of total voters in the last gubernatorial election — whichever is smaller — are required to get a proposal on the ballot. But if a charter revision commission proposes changes, the proposals created via petition have to wait until the next election.
The bill would eliminate the mayor’s “bumping” powers. It had never passed both houses of the state Legislature until last week, when Simone and Sen. Liz Krueger, a fellow Manhattan Democrat, were able to get it to the floor for a vote.
Krueger said she was troubled by ballot bumping before she took office. She said she signed a petition on the Yankee Stadium issue in 1998, when Giuliani appointed a commission that blocked it by putting a minor campaign finance question on the ballot instead.
“He is not the first mayor to do it,” Krueger said of Giuliani. “De Blasio did it also. Bloomberg did it also, and Eric Adams seems to do it every year. And all this is doing is preventing ‘we the people’ from having the right to petition to bring questions to the ballot.”
The New York Conference of Mayors sees the issue differently. The group, which represents cities and villages and counts New York City as its largest member, argues the bumping provision serves a purpose. Without it, conflicting proposals could end up on the ballot at the same time, which could confuse voters, the organization says.
“Placing multiple conflicting charter revision propositions on a single ballot can undermine this goal by creating confusion, thereby making the entire process less democratic,” conference spokesperson Hannah DiLiberto said.
The current law accounts for the possibility that conflicting proposals make it onto the ballot. In that case, the proposal with the greatest number of “yes” votes would win out.
Hochul, who has tried to maintain a positive working relationship with Adams, has given no indication about her stance on the bill. She proposed a series of guardrails for the mayor’s office amid Adams’ legal troubles earlier this year but dropped the issue after lawmakers showed little interest in her plan.
Hochul effectively has until the end of the year to sign or veto the bill. A spokesperson for the governor said she would review the legislation.
While Adams opposes the measure, it has support from a competing mayoral candidate: City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams.
The three state lawmakers running for New York City mayor — Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Jessica Ramos of Queens, and Sen. Zellnor Myrie of Brooklyn — all missed the vote on the bill last week, which came within two weeks of the June 24 primary.
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is polling as the leading candidate for the Democratic mayoral nomination, declined to weigh in on the bill. A spokesperson sa
