When polls close Tuesday, all eyes will be on control of Congress. Unfortunately, far less attention will be on whether New York voters approve updates to the City Charter to help the city government deliver for us.
We certainly need the help. Our 1.4% vacancy rate for apartments is pushing rents to unprecedented heights. Hundreds of New Yorkers die each year on our streets. Small businesses are shuttering and nonprofit service providers are struggling to get paid for their work. Fiscal threats from Washington are putting our financial future at risk.
New Yorkers who want city government to be more responsive to those challenges should vote yes on all five amendments.
The amendments are supported by progressive leaders like the New York Working Families Party and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, major labor unions like 32BJ and HTC, good government and policy experts like Citizens Union and the Fiscal Policy Institute, Democratic Clubs like the New Kings Democrats and Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, issue advocates focused on affordability like Riders Alliance and the Regional Plan Association, and many more.
The low profile of Proposals 1-5 has obscured their broad support — and the necessity of their passage to ungrinding the gears of city government.
Mayor Mamdani convened the Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE) earlier this year. After months of research and public feedback, including two hearings in each borough, the commission recommended the updates now on our ballots.
Proposal 1 updates the process through which the city provides “revocable consent” to use of street space, shifting public feedback from often-empty hearing rooms to accessible online platforms.
Proposal 2 streamlines contracting with the city so that a hot dog cart and a multibillion-dollar conglomerate don’t both have to fill out the same paperwork.
Proposal 3 lets the city undertake street safety improvements, sell unused plots of land, and lease office space all with a little bit less hoop-jumping.
Proposal 4 sends home builders to one portal for permits rather than making them fill out similar forms at eighteen different agencies, and lets more officials approve certificates of occupancy (now capped at three per borough).
Proposal 5 sets targets for savings into the Rainy Day Fund, preparing us to keep providing services during financial downturns.
Importantly, these amendments aren’t about changing any of the underlying standards for our streeteries, new homes, nonprofit service providers, or anything else — they’re merely about updating onerous city processes that would make Byzantium blush.
It shouldn’t take 19 months for a restaurant to get an outdoor dining permit — six months longer than it took to build the Empire State Building — a delay that can mean two summers’ worth of lost revenue and employment. After a builder has negotiated with communities, paperwork shouldn’t bar getting shovels in the ground and heads in beds. It shouldn’t take years for public servants to rent the office space they need to do their jobs.
If a blue tsunami does land on Tuesday, it will be because Americans are fed up with cronyism and corruption. Here, our problem isn’t government only working for the ultra-rich and well-connected. It’s government not working — period.
But the harms are similar: higher costs, less safe communities, and a belief that democracy isn’t worth investing in.
New Yorkers shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to address those failures. Let’s flip our ballots and get the city back to work.
Kessler and Vaughan are the co-executive directors of Abundance New York, which leads the Yes on COGE coalition.