Here you’ll find questions, mostly of a legal nature directly concerned with this effort, until they are completely answered. Findings are best noted in a comment to the question, ideally including documentation. New questions are sent to the researchers’ email discussion list.

Could it not be argued that messing with term limits requires a mandatory referendum under the state’s Municipal Home Rule Law §23 (2) (e) on mandatory referenda, wherein any local law that

“changes the method of nominating, electing or removing an elective officer, or  changes  the  term  of  an elective office [cannot take effect until approved by the people]”?

Does it not change the method of removing an elective officer?  And since term limits are a local law enacted after the Municipal Home Rule Law, could it not be argued that changing them also runs afoul of the intent of “changes the term of an elective office”?

It would be ideal if we could fit our entire proposed text and as many signatures as possible on one normal page to allow petitioners to easily download and print the petition and avoid the need for multiple places to sign.

Would both sides require signatures if we kept to one double-sided sheet?

The Board of Elections refers us to the city clerk, who is responsible for certifying our petitions. His counsel has been less than forthcoming as to whether dates apply. But I think we now have a schedule..

Everyone I’d spoken to from previous campaigns remembered there being a period within which they gathered signatures but couldn’t recall details. The good people who worked on the More Gardens attempt a few years ago and those involved in the 1970s attempt to keep nukes out of the harbor remember having a specific window, but also couldn’t recall. The lawyer William Pepper for the 9/11 Truth guys’ (in my sympathetic opinion doomed) ballot initiative attempt thinks there is no limit.

For a while I thought the signatures, which §24 of the Municipal Home Rule Law states

shall be signed and authenticated in the manner provided by the election law for the signing and authentication of nominating petitions so far as applicable.

would have to comply with the the §6-138 of Election Law’s requirement that

4. A signature made earlier than six weeks prior to the last day to file independent petitions shall not be counted.

However, the smaller class sizes campaign gathered their signatures for over 9 weeks in 2005, and didn’t seem to run into trouble on that account. The deadline they used coincides with my understanding of the law. Given Jerry Goldfeder was Class Size Matters’ lawyer, we can probably safely assume we have at least 9 weeks, meaning the date to finalize the amendment text moves up to the end of April, but that we will only have to field less than 30 signature gatherers a day instead of 40. It may well be that we have more time under the law, but I think finalizing our proposal’s text and building the petitioning capacity by May is about as fast as we can go.

If you like research and can access legal research tools through a school, public library, or employer, you’re gold, for while there are plenty who enjoy figuring out the relevant law, time is short and the tasks are many! Plenty of research can also be done via the free resources at right and elsewhere.

Questions posted in Petitioning, Our Case, or Drafting the Amendment are additionally posted in Questions by an editor, and sent to the researcher discussion list.  Sign up!

It’s a good idea to report findings that are part of a longer effort as they are made to prevent duplication of effort. All findings should initially by reported as comments to their questions. Once a question is completely answered it is removed from the Questions category by an editor.

For those new to legal research: document your findings well so others can make use of them! It is particularly useful to employ legal citations (ideally New York State conventions where appropriate), accompanying each citation with a brief statement of its relevance, but every bit helps! Even if you cannot easily access LexisNexis or WestLaw - services that for the time being effectively hold a monopoly on convenient access to most legislative histories and opinions of state courts - through one of the above mentioned routes, pretty much all the current statute and constitutional law is freely available via the links at right.

Remember some questions are also answered most quickly by picking up the phone or visiting a library or other repository.

Counsel to the City Clerk told me he was under the impression he would not provide petition form and that we were not to submit our proposed amendment until we did so with the petitions.

I wish that were sufficient, but I’m afraid we’ll need confirmation from another source, preferably documentation.

if yes, this would put at least the principle of our forum as an alternative to the traditional petitioning process on firm legal ground thanks to §8 of the General City Law and the duplicate section of the MHR.

there is an old case (sorry, i can’t find my documentation right now…) that was decided on a supposed difference between a ballot question, and a ballot proposition. Can someone figure out what that would be under current NY state law?