On the back of this year’s General Election ballot, voters will have the opportunity to decide 6 ballot proposals. Proposal 1 is statewide and proposes adding anti-discrimination provisions to the State Constitution. Proposals 2 through 6 are the result of Mayor Adams’ rushed Charter Revision Commission and could significantly impact the responsiveness, transparency, and accountability of city government to New Yorkers. Earlier this year, Mayor Adams rushed through a Charter Revision Commission process to advance ballot proposals that would change the city’s constitution. They could weaken checks-and-balances, making city government less responsive to New Yorkers.
The commission bypassed the current lawmaking process — which allows New Yorkers to shape our laws with their input over the course of 271 days — advancing the mayor’s proposals to the General Election ballot just 2 days after they were announced publicly.
As New Yorkers prepare to cast their votes on November 5th, below is what you need to know about Mayor Adams’ Proposals 2 – 6, as well as Proposal 1—the NY State Equal Rights Amendment.
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Ballot Initiatives Public Presentation
New York State Equal Right Amendment
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PROPOSAL 1: Protecting New Yorkers’ Fundamental Rights
Description
The proposal prohibits discrimination based on ethnicity, national origin, age, disability and sex – including sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, and abortion rights – by enshrining these rights in the state constitution.
Impact
- Protects abortion access: Safeguards the right to abortion under the state constitution, ensuring lasting protections based on pregnancy status regardless of any changes at the federal level.
- Keeps power in New Yorkers hands: Solidifies protections for civil rights in the State Constitution, keeping decision-making in the hands of the people of our state.
- Closes loopholes: Strengthens anti-discrimination laws, closing the gaps that could be exploited to deny civil rights.
Mayor Adams’ Proposals 2-6
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PROPOSAL 2: More Enforcement & Regulations by Sanitation Agency
Description
This proposal skipped the typical lawmaking process that allows New Yorkers to help shape proposed laws through input and aims to give more power for increased enforcement and regulations to the City’s Sanitation Department.
Impact
- Increases small business enforcement: Gives the Department more power to enforce rules against small businesses across the City.
- Expands authority for more rules: Provides the Department with more power over regulations on the placement of trash bags.
- Undermines public input on cleanliness: Bypasses and reduces the public’s ability to influence specific changes to sanitation laws.
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PROPOSAL 3: Wasteful Spending, Slower Results & Less Budget Transparency
Description
This proposal requires redundant review processes of proposed laws, adding significant taxpayer costs and delays to lawmaking. It also reduces budget transparency by giving the public less time to examine the mayor’s proposed budget.
Impact
- Increases bureaucracy and taxpayer costs: Requires thousands of hours of extra work for unnecessarily redundant reviews of proposed laws, increasing wasteful spending and working hours.
- Slows ability to solve problems: Reduces the ability to advance timely solutions with proposed laws by creating scheduling roadblocks.
- Weakens budget transparency: Delays budget deadlines for the Mayor and gives the public and oversight bodies less time to review and critique the Mayor’s proposed budget (i.e. cuts to libraries).
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PROPOSAL 4: Blocking Public Safety Laws
Description
This proposal would block the ability to pass laws that improve public safety in response to New Yorkers’ priorities by adding excessive bureaucracy and mayoral interference in scheduling.
Impact
- Delays public safety laws: Adds excessive scheduling requirements that would delay public safety laws in response to emerging threats, like fire safety.
- Undermines accountability: Gives the mayor power to interfere in lawmaking that holds their administration accountable for corruption, dysfunction, and failures in public safety.
- Blocks urgent safety fixes: Prevents votes on public safety laws in the final month of legislative sessions, limiting lawmakers’ abilities to address urgent community needs.
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PROPOSAL 5: Meaningless & Misleading Capital Planning Changes
Description
This proposal falsely claims to improve the city’s capital planning process, but it offers no meaningful improvements and fails to advance transparency. It disregards independent recommendations to change the City’s comprehensive infrastructure report and instead proposes changes to a different process that covers less than 1% of the City’s infrastructure.
Impact
- Fails to advance reform: Ignores recommended reforms that could fix inefficiencies and the lack of transparency in the City’s capital planning process.
- Distracts from real problems: Introduces meaningless changes to a process that affects less than 1% of the City’s infrastructure, while falsely claiming to address a serious issue and misleading the public.
- Leaves NYC without clear infrastructure review: Leaves City without an accurate review of its infrastructure, including schools, libraries, roads and sidewalks, pipes that deliver clean water, and flooded sewers.
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PROPOSAL 6: Changes to Unrelated City Operations
Description
This proposal claims to change the authority and structures of several unrelated city offices and formalizes an existing role. Most of the changes could have been accomplished through the city’s lawmaking process that provides greater opportunities for public input to shape policy proposals. Instead, this proposal allows the Mayor to make changes developed with far less public input outside of his Administration.
Impact
- Names Existing Positions: Places the existing Chief Business Diversity Officer position in the city constitution without any apparent improvements.
- Gives Mayor power over business permits: Shifts more power to the mayor for issuing permits for film and television productions.
- Changes city archive process: Merges two existing boards responsible for reviewing city archives.