Opinion: How not to run a charter revision commission

From the Jan. 6 insurrection to Project 2025 to Donald Trump vowing to use his presidential power to wage a campaign of vengeance against his political rivals, American democracy has not faced a crisis like the one we are currently experiencing since the Civil War. The good news is that despite the best efforts of the current U.S. Supreme Court, we are so far protected against the worst excesses of our leaders by the civil rights and democratic process enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

New York City’s charter – the city’s constitution – is maybe the most important document most New Yorkers have never read. On May 21, just two months before the deadline to place charter charges on the November ballot, Mayor Eric Adams established a commission to revise the document that spells out many of the most important details about how our city’s democracy functions, leaving it to a politically overburdened public to respond during the hottest months of the summer.

Tragically, the mayor’s sloppily formed and rushed commission threatens to undermine New York City’s democracy at the same moment that Trumpian attacks are hollowing out America’s.

First, the mayor packed and staffed the commission exclusively with his political allies rather than with a representative cross-section of New Yorkers, ensuring that the commission would ratify any Adams power grab. Then the commissioners held hearings that were shambolic, rushed, and barely publicized, with the commissioners themselves (rather than members of the public) at times testifying to nearly empty rooms. 

The commission’s scant, hastily assembled preliminary report was released on Monday, June 24, giving New Yorkers only thirteen working days to review its recommendations before public testimony closed. The ethos of a commission tinkering with the heart of New York City’s democratic structure should be to do everything in its power to ensure transparency and encourage public awareness and participation. The mayor’s commission appears to be designed to do precisely the opposite.

Why would Adams rush through a problematic charter revision? For all the wrong reasons: petty political retribution and a hunger for more power over the City Council. This process is not only absurd, but angering because it is so not how democracy should and can work.  

I should know, because I’m a veteran of what a good charter revision process looks like. In 1988–89, the city had to revise its charter to comply with court decisions outlawing the structure of our government at the time. We formed an ad hoc organization with participants from government, labor, academia and the general public; we came up with new options for how the government could work and new parameters for the future role of borough presidents who had lost their right to vote on a Board of Estimate that would no longer exist. We batted around ideas among ourselves and in meetings with the Charter Revision Commission. We helped to shape new ways to keep a borough-wide as well as a citywide perspective. And our commissioners were genuinely, seriously interested in ideas from the public. It worked because many different constituencies were committed to the result.

New York City should be an example to the nation and the state of how good, transparent and participatory government should function and how real democracy should flourish. We should not be emulating the worst examples of anti-democratic, autocratic or impulsive behavior. 

A diverse array of elected officials, good government groups and community-based organizations, as well as many individual New Yorkers who have managed to learn about and attend one of the commission’s few perfunctory hearings, have called for any charter revision ballot measures to be delayed until November 2025 so that more New Yorkers – with more and different perspectives – can participate in a real, responsible and transparent process befitting the greatest city on earth. For the sake of our democracy, I second that call.