The City Council Rules Committee is set to have a hearing this morning on what they are calling “the most comprehensive revision of the Rules of the Council since 2014.” With only 100 days remaining for Speaker Adrienne Adams and Rules Committee Chair Keith Powers and other term-limited members, the matter should be tabled until the new Council, new speaker and new Rules chair take office in the new year.
The last big change in the Council’s rules was in May 2014, which occurred only after months of public debate. The impetus was the 2013 elections and a new speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, and Councilman Brad Lander as the new chair of the Rules Committee. During the five months following Mark-Viverito’s January installation, there was a great deal of back and forth and discussion led by Lander, as there should have been for such an important measure, regarding how the local legislature operates.
Adams wasn’t around for that, having first been elected in 2017 and taking office as a freshman in 2018, but if she was she would have seen the correct way to proceed.
Instead, the proposed rules were published just four days ago and go before the committee today. And the 44-page resolution and accompanying 141-page report have been placed by Adams on the Council’s agenda for this coming Thursday to finalize the changes. Such a rushed, slapdash procedure is no good.
Adams has been speaker for three years and nearly nine months, so why with just 100 days remaining in her tenure, is this happening now? Far better to leave it for the next Council and the next speaker.
If the staff of the Council is the answer to why now, sorry folks, the unelected staff is exactly that: unelected.
Adams and the Council staff, such as the top lawyer, Jason Otaño, already tried this month to get the Board of Elections to remove three questions meant to spur housing construction from the general election ballot and it was only the intervention of the governor that stopped them.
The speaker should not sully further the past four years by jamming through some changes to hand over to the new speaker.
What this Council and this speaker can, and should, do is pass a worthy transparency improvement to how the city handles Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests for public records.
Under the bill, which has more than two dozen cosponsors, the city Department of Records and Information Services would create a centralized FOIL request website to receive, track, update, and post responses to agency FOIL requests. Then the taxpaying public could easily see how agencies from Sanitation to the FDNY to the NYPD to every branch of city government are processing FOIL requests and how quickly (or slowly) they take to respond.
That is a far better way for Adams to wrap up her time as speaker, making government more open and accessible to the people it is supposed to be serving.
As for the Council rules changes, file them away and let the next speaker and the next Council, who take office on Jan. 1, debate and decide what should be the best way for them to operate instead of it being imposed on them. Four years ago, incoming Speaker Adams wasn’t given a new set of rules by her predecessor when she started, so why should her successor be so weighed down?
