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“Unprecedented, undemocratic and unlawful”: So the executive director of the city Charter Revision Commission describes the last-minute plot by the City Council and shifty Brooklyn hack Frank Seddio to keep pro-housing measures off the November ballot.
The scheme, apparently blocked because word got out, turned on Seddio (the former Kings County Democratic boss) leading the Board of Elections to invalidate the measures due to allegedly confusing language.
These charter proposals would give mayors more authority over housing development by reducing the (completely unofficial) veto power that individual councilmembers now exercise of rezoning and related issues in their districts.
The council appoints BOE commissioners (who are nominated by county Democratic and Republican party bosses), so it apparently thinks the board will do as it’s ordered.
Yet by precedent and law, the BOE is limited to placing charter revision questions on the ballot — what’s known as a “ministerial duty,” not a discretionary power.
And last month, the City Clerk — also a council appointee — certified the measures (raising zero concern about language), clearing the way for the board to approve them by Thursday so they can go to the printers in time to get the ballots out to military voters, as federal law requires.
Only with days to go did Seddio raise the “clarity” issue, plainly with an eye to having the BOE take the proposals off the ballot with no time for the decision to be reversed by, say, a court challenge.
In other words, the conspirators waited ’til the last minute to spring this surprise, a lawless and cowardly bid to end-run around Mayor Eric Adams’ legal authority to present charter amendments directly to voters.
How sleazy is Seddio? Well, in the past 12 months, he has filed over 500 “no-fault” auto-insurance lawsuits on behalf of a Brooklyn-based physician with a history of insurance-fraud allegations.
Publicity may have already stopped this scheme, but we can’t be sure until the board votes: If the dirty trick goes ahead, the commissioners who played along must face some reckoning for betraying their oaths and duties.