If Mayor Michael Bloomberg gets his way, the city will soon see its eighth charter revision in nine years. The mayor’s office is declining to say what sort of changes the mayor has in mind or even whom he would name to the commission he proposed, leaving some wondering whether he plans revisions as expansive as those of 1989, which radically restructured city government, or whether he is simply looking to codify his legacy as he enters the lame duck phase of his administration.
In his State of the City speech, during which he announced this effort, Bloomberg made clear that he intends to target the appointment process of the city’s Board of Elections. Election commissioners are appointed by party bosses and approved by the City Council, a process viewed by some as political patronage.
“2008 is the 130th anniversary of the death of Boss Tweed,” Bloomberg said. “Let’s also make it the year we finally put to rest his style of politics.”
The commission is being given 18 months to review the entire charter, which Baruch College professor Doug Muzzio said is more than enough time to make wide-ranging changes.
“This would be a long one,” Muzzio said, “because he wants to do the big study and he wants it on the ballot at the same time as the citywide elections of 2009, exactly 20 years after the last big revision.”
Potential topics that could appear on the 2009 ballot include nonpartisan elections—which Bloomberg failed to get voters to adopt in 2003—term limits and campaign finance, Muzzio said. Bloomberg is vocal in his support of term limits, and has recently ramped up his criticism of the campaign finance system.
Charter commissions have previously been wielded by both Bloomberg and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (R) to blunt public referendums and censor public officials. (In 1999, then-Senate candidate Giuliani famously created a charter commission stoked with loyalists to look at mayoral succession in an attempt to prevent then-Public Advocate Mark Green from succeeding Giuliani if he was elected to the Senate.)
In a departure from previous years, Bloomberg said the commission’s work will dovetail with a similar review by Citizens Union, a good government group.
Dick Dadey, the organization’s executive director, said the primary goal of any charter commission should be to make city government more transparent and accessible.
“I don’t know if this is about his legacy,” Dadey said. “I see it as more of a non-partisan exercise with an eye toward forwarding not any one political agenda but improving city government as a whole.”
Council Member Lewis Fidler (D-Brooklyn) said the current commission should look closely at the city’s laws governing term limits, but he doubts it will.
“When he first said it, in a moment of euphoria combined with stupidity, I thought maybe he was actually going to offer us a third term,” Fidler said. “Quite frankly, that would have been a hugely good government solution.”
In the past, the introduction of a charter commission immediately sparked rumors that offices such as borough president and public advocate, which were stripped of some of their power after the 1989 revision, would be eliminated.
If these are part of the proposed revisions, voters would face a ballot next year which asked them whether they wanted these offices to continue existing while simultaneously voting for who would be the new people to hold these offices.   
But that may be too controversial for this commission, said Gene Russianoff, a senior lawyer at the New York Public Interest Research Group.
“They don’t want to put out a ballot initiative that’s going to be wildly controversial,” he said. “I don’t think he has an axe to go after anybody.”
While Russianoff has been critical of the frequency at which both Bloomberg and Giuliani have called for charter revisions, he said he senses a different spirit in the discussions this time.
Following the State of the City, Russianoff met with Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey and Anthony Crowell, Bloomberg’s special counsel, to discuss the proposal.
The feeling Russianoff and others have gotten is that Bloomberg will mostly focus on making permanent some of the innovations he has brought to city government over the past six years, including 311 and the citywide performance reporting tools.
“What they say is it’s the end of their tenure in office and they’d like to institutionalize some of the changes they’ve made,” he said. “I take their motives as sincere.”
Esther Fuchs, a professor of public affairs at Columbia University who chaired a 2003 charter commission while serving as special advisor to Bloomberg, said the possibilities for change in this latest push are enormous. Modernizing and streamlining the administrative code written into the charter would be a major and much needed step, she said.  
“There are all sorts of assumptions in the charter that are detailed and go back to particular historic periods of time that don’t make sense anymore,” she said. “When I was looking at it I was saying, ‘Why the hell would the city charter have such detail on the structure of the Sanitation Department?’”
Despite what others think, Fuchs said she still expects the new commission to look very closely at the possibility of eliminating the offices of borough president and public advocate.
“In the back, you whisper about all the proposals that could come through. Invariably,” she said, “those issues come up.”