All five charter amendments passed, and the agencies charged with speeding things up have scheduled a kickoff meeting to plan the kickoff meeting.
NEW YORK, New York (Spintaxi) – New Yorkers voted overwhelmingly this week to make their government faster, and the government has responded with characteristic urgency by forming a working group to determine what “faster” means, how it should be measured, and whether anyone has the authority to start the clock.
All five ballot proposals backed by City Hall passed, the Amsterdam News reported, while Brooklyn Magazine described the results as Mamdani’s “Faster Government” ballot measures sweeping the midterms. The mayor’s office celebrated with a press release titled, in full, “Mayor Mamdani Applauds New Yorkers for Voting to Make Government Work Faster,” which went out promptly, a fact several agency veterans described as “showing off.”
What Voters Actually Approved
The measures were five charter amendments touching, as Ballotpedia’s preview put it, permitting, contracting and other government processes. In plain English, they are designed to make it quicker for the city to approve things, buy things and build things. In New York English, they are designed to reduce the number of offices that must stamp a form before a different office can lose it.
A study by the Gotham Institute for Procedural Studies, which took eleven months to approve its own study, found that the average city permit currently passes through 14 desks, 3 floors, 2 boroughs and 1 fax machine that every agency believes belongs to another agency. The institute’s researchers tracked a single application for a curb cut in Bay Ridge and lost contact with it near Chambers Street, where it is believed to be living quietly under a new name.
“People think the city is slow,” said institute fellow Augustina Pereira-Klein. “It is not slow. It is thorough in a way that resembles a coma. There is a difference, and that difference has its own committee.”
The Implementation Plan, Obtained by Reporters
A draft memo circulated among agency heads the morning after the vote laid out the city’s roadmap for acceleration. It was printed on the official letterhead of the Interagency Working Group on Velocity Implementation, a body created last spring and staffed, according to its own organizational chart, by a chair, a vice chair and a man named Gerald who handles the sign-in sheet.
MEMORANDUM. RE: Voter Mandate for Expedited Government. Phase One: Convene stakeholders to define “expedited.” Phase Two: Circulate the definition for comment. Phase Three: Respond to comments on the definition. Phase Four: Hold a public hearing on whether the definition is too slow. Phase Five through Eighteen: To be determined at a meeting to be scheduled. Phase Nineteen: Go faster. Please note that this memo supersedes the prior memo, which superseded a memo that was never sent but is still binding. Kindly initial each page in blue ink. Black ink will be returned to sender.
Reached by phone, the deputy assistant commissioner for velocity, Lucinda Brathwaite-Osei, said the timeline was “aggressive but achievable.” Asked when Phase Nineteen would begin, she put the call on hold for nine minutes, then returned to say she would need to check with the working group, which does not meet until the working group schedules a meeting.
Contractors Cautiously Optimistic, Mostly About Being Paid
The contracting changes drew particular attention from the nonprofits and small businesses that do work for the city, many of whom describe the current payment process as “a long-distance relationship with a check.”
“I delivered folding chairs to a senior center in Flatbush during the de Blasio years,” said Wojciech Szymanski, who runs a party rental company out of Canarsie. “The chairs have been sat on, folded, unfolded, repaired and thrown away. I am still waiting to be paid for them. I have been told my invoice is in a ‘queue.’ I have a queue in my kitchen. It is my children asking when we can afford a vacation.”
A Queens-based architect, Ophelia Mendonca-Rhee, said she voted for every proposal “the way you vote for a miracle. You don’t expect it, but you’d feel foolish leaving it blank.”
The Stand-Up Perspective
Comic Leopold Arceneaux-Watts, who performs at a Lower East Side club with a capacity of 40 and a fire certificate from the Giuliani era, has been doing a bit about the ballot measures all week. “Only in New York do you have to vote to ask the government to do things it already said it does,” he told a crowd that, by his count, included three city planners in disguise. “It’s like voting for the pizza to be hot. Thank you. We assumed. We just didn’t know it needed a referendum.”
The bit ends with a line that, he says, made a table of Buildings Department inspectors laugh so hard one of them wrote the club a violation: “They say the new charter cuts red tape. I’ve seen the city cut red tape. First you need a permit for the scissors.”
Comparisons From the Farm Belt
City lawyers have already noted that changing the charter required a commission, a summer of hearings and a citywide vote, while, as farm.fm pointed out in its report on scientists who managed to rewrite soybean DNA, agricultural researchers can reorganize the basic code of a living organism without once requiring a notary. “Rewriting a soybean is easier than rewriting a New York agency,” said Pereira-Klein, “because the soybean does not have a union, a pension or a nephew.”
Not everyone is convinced the measures will change much. City & State, which had flagged Mamdani’s five ballot proposals appearing set to pass as returns came in, will now presumably spend the next several years tracking whether they do anything. The editors of bohiney.com have opened a betting pool on which arrives first, the first expedited permit or the next charter commission, and say the action is heavily on the commission.
By the end of the week, the working group had reported its first concrete accomplishment. Gerald confirmed that the sign-in sheet for the kickoff meeting had been approved in record time, under four business days, and would be posted to the city website as soon as someone could locate the form required to request a posting.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/