Well, to no one’s surprise, it does not look as though NYCCAN will be getting on the ballot.  Worth noting though is that not among the things found invalid in their petition was that some of their signatures were from before the previous general election.  According to their website’s FAQ,

Each of the 30,000+ signatures collected in 2008 remain valid until the signer is no longer a registered voter in New York City.

Whether the validity of the signatures was ultimately not contested because the city was confident the measure would be blocked based on its content, I don’t know.  Given NYCCAN’s demonstrated tunnel-vision, a grain of salt is needed, but still..

Also not appearing on the ballot will be…Bloomberg’s threatened revisions which have quietly disappeared never having been specified, the unreachable deputy mayor once responsible for their formulation dropping any mention of them from her title, the threat having, except in NYCCAN’s case, achieved its goal.  Sigh.

The only questions on the ballot will be two state constitutional revisions placed on the ballot by the legislature.  Kind of quaint how the people create the government, but then changes to it can only come from those they hire to run it, huh?  Even when we next get the option to call a constitutional convention in 2017, it’ll be through delegates elected from state senate districts, and everything will be on the table, not just whatever changes we might want.

Last week when I visited Richard Briffault, a professor of legislation at Columbia who has written a bit on home rule, he was, at least in his first off-the-cuff reaction to this effort, encouraging, seeing no problem with the principle of local initiative rights under NY state law.

would be a more difficult thing to get through a NYS court. So Daniel Yohannes has said from the jump, and I am inclined to agree. State law goes into much more detail about what sorts of City Council lawmaking citizens are effectively permitted to exercise veto power over in section 24 of the Municipal Home Rule Law. And there is some case law to the effect that laws made by the people cannot be held anymore sacred than laws made by their representatives. Therefore, it might be prudent, to avoid getting tripped up where the state has preempted the field, and the case law is more damning, to scrap our additions to section 38 of the charter.

Another benefit of our proposed forum is that, by leveling the playing field to ease the people’s access to passing law (while simultaneously improving the quality of the laws proposed), it makes council action to negate citizen enacted laws less troubling, since any ongoing dispute between the people and their representatives (with the most recent law taking priority) is ultimately likely to result in more civic participation and representative accountability, and in the long term better government and fairer laws.

(Our next real opportunity to gain the fuller referendum powers enjoyed by many of our countrymen, is in 2017, when the people of the state will next be able to vote on whether to call a constitutional convention. See you there!)

From the state of New York’s ratification of the U.S. Constitution:

all Power is originally vested in and consequently derived from the People, and … Government is instituted by them for their common Interest…

and

the Powers of Government may be reassumed by the People, whensoever it shall become necessary to their Happiness

They were just restating the at the time obvious first principles of the Declaration of Independence, but it seems worth noting.

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?

How far can we go in creating a costless open and deliberative petition process? Well it may turn out that “questions” are different from initiatives, i don’t know how, but if not..
According to the state’s General City law:

§ 8. Law applicable to conduct of elections at which ballot questions
are submitted to all the voters of a city. The provisions of the
election law or any other law relating to the submission of questions at
general elections, so far as the same are applicable and not
inconsistent with this chapter, shall apply to the conduct of all
elections at which questions are submitted to all the voters of a city.
Where a specific provision of law exists in any other law which is
inconsistent with the provisions of the election law, such provision
shall apply unless a provision of the election law specifies that such
provision of the election law shall apply notwithstanding any other
provision of law.

Even after we have gathered all the necessary signatures, and overcome the likely intransigence of the city in court, the mayor can knock us off the ballot by proposing a charter revision. Its unclear what sort of time constraints there would be for that right now, and in fact, given his anti-machine path to the mayoralty, whether he would even want to stop us. We may want to approach him shortly before we submit our petitions.

Who knows, maybe we will see all of our potential allegiances short-circuited by what will coincidentally turn out to seem the most responsive year in city hall history. That could be fun..

Update Note!: When Susan Howard, who got it from the lawyers she worked with on the failed More Gardens charter amendment campaign a few years back, told me this I thought, “Shit!” Turns out however, at least as I read the law (§36, subdivision 5(e) and (g) of the state’s Municipal Home Rule Law), that this would only be a temporary setback, as our amendment would have to be placed on the following year’s ballot. No biggy!

Additional Update!: The Class Size Matters campaign supposedly met a similar fate, but did not get on the ballot the following year. Its founder Leonie Haimson was unable to tell me why. We really need to read the judges’ opinions in all previous charter amendment by petition attempts in the state.