What Do New York City’s Ballot Proposals Mean?

Photo: Selcuk Acar/Anadolu/Getty Images Zohran Mamdani sailed into City Hall a year ago on a promise to make New York City more affordable, and this election cycle, the mayor has had a related goal in mind: cutting red tape. Earlier this year, the mayor tasked his Commission on Government Efficiency with hearing out New Yorkers, including municipal employees, on approaches they thought would help get things done faster. Now, as New Yorkers head to the polls, they will be voting on COGE’s proposed changes to the city charter aiming to do just that. Propositions 1, 3, and 4 are arguably the most infrastructure related, and we’ve evaluated them all below. (The others, Propositions 2 and 5, are concerned with the city’s contracting and procurement process and setting contribution targets for New York’s rainy-day fund.) A common theme across a number of these ballot measures is removing requisite public meetings and inputs, which is why some of the loudest opposition to some of these proposals is coming from community and local preservation groups that aren’t necessarily aligned against Mamdani most of the time. While the fights aren’t anywhere near the level of last year’s disputes between the mayor and the City Council, there’s been grumbling, as expected, about the fact that the measures would once again chip away at some of the council’s oversight powers. Proposition 1 would speed up the applications businesses submit so they can use public space for dining sheds, ramps, and other purposes. This ballot question is particularly timely since it’s coming on the heels of legislation that revived year-round streeteries, and it’s clearly geared toward Mamdani’s promise to help small businesses. Today, restaurants looking to open up a year-round sidewalk café face a lengthy process that, according to reports from COGE and the Comptroller’s Office, can take upward of eight months. The proposal aims to cut that to two months, in large part by making the required public hearings optional; the City Council also no longer would be able to reject a business’s permit after the Department of Transportation has approved it. (In addition, it would get rid of an antiquated rule requiring businesses to buy newspaper ads announcing their intentions ahead of the hearings.) Proposition 3 would speed up the construction of street-safety projects while also making it easier for the city to sell land or lease office space, all under one ballot proposal. For the transportation component, the city is here too looking to cut the time it takes to finish bike- and bus-lane projects by cutting out onerous reviews — for example, how many officials across different agencies need to sign off on the Department of Transportation’s plans. It also would allow DOT to start construction on these projects at the same time it alerts community-board members and local elected officials about them, rather than afterward. According to COGE, all of this would speed up bike- and bus-lane construction by 33 percent. As for the second part of this ballot measure, the city would be able to sell its lots smaller than 10,000 and landmarked properties’ development rights in 90 days instead of seven months, and undevelopable land could be sold to adjacent properties’ owners without a public auction. The third prong of this proposal would move things along by nixing the need for hearings and approvals by the City Council and the City Planning Commission when the city leases office space for its employees. Proposition 4 would create a single, centralized construction-permitting hub under the Department of Buildings that applicants could go to, rather than waiting for responses from multiple agencies as things currently stand. The ballot proposal would also move the permitting process for projects at city-owned waterfront properties to the DOB from the Department of Small Business Services, which currently has that authority, and would empower more Buildings officials to approve certificates of occupancy. Local community groups, perhaps unsurprisingly, are some of the loudest critics. The Columbia Street Waterfront District, for example, has urged people to vote “no” on the ballot proposals, characterizing all five as a “coordinated power grab designed to strip away community input, silence your City Council representatives, & hand unchecked control over to the Mayor’s office.” Other groups have been more targeted: The Municipal Art Society of New York is urging people to vote “yes” on Propositions 1 and 4 but has criticized Proposition 3, saying the proposal is a mishmash of “three proposed charter revisions in one” and would make it easier to sell public land or development rights “without sufficient safeguards to ensure lasting public benefits.” (The New York Landmarks Conservancy similarly opposes Proposition 3 over concerns about the bundled changes and the removal of public review prior to the sale or transfer of development rights for any city-owned landmarked property.) The government-watchdog organization Common Cause, meanwhile, has criticized Proposition 1 because it would remove legislative oversight and public input on the use of shared space. “Streamlining administrative processes should not mean removing meaningful opportunities for New Yorkers and their elected representatives to weigh in on decisions affecting public spaces,” the group said. (The group supports Proposition 4 and is sitting out No. 3.) As for City Council members, their criticisms have been fairly tame compared with last year’s fireworks over pro-development Adams-administration measures that were seen as an existential threat to the council’s power. A handful of council members from both sides of the aisle have aired broad grievances that the ballot measures would reduce both the council’s oversight powers and the public’s. But Speaker Julie Menin said last month that she wasn’t going to tap the council’s resources for another ad blitz this year. “Individual council members have a variety of different opinions,” she said at a news conference about the ballot measures. “But certainly, I will not authorize expenditure of council resources on ballot measures. I don’t agree with that.” The New York City Hospitality Alliance, a restaurant-owner trade group, is (predictably) backing Proposition 1, and many good-government groups are largely in favor of Propositions 1, 3, and 4. Reinvent Albany is among those backing Propositions 1 through 4 but made a point to note that its support of No. 3 was largely based on speeding up safe-streets initiatives and not the land-use changes. (“Multiple, unrelated changes to the City Charter should be presented to voters as separate, individual questions,” it said.) Citizens Union similarly threw its support behind all of the ballot initiatives but shared that it was getting bombarded with questions about whether the Mamdani administration had verged on electioneering on the public dime with its slickly produced ads. Pro-development and housing wonks, including Abundance New York and Open New York, are mostly backing these ballot measures. “The need to build housing in this city has never been more urgent, and it’s encouraging to see an administration treating that urgency as a management problem it can actually solve,” Annemarie Gray, Open New York’s executive director, said. What Do New York City’s Ballot Proposals Mean? Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.