The League in New York City by Kristen Chu

Hello from New York City! As a LWVSF board member for eight years and a San Franciscan for almost 20, my family’s move to the Big Apple last spring has been a big change in many ways. For example, the weather gets hotter, not colder, in the summer in NYC. And I can get almost anywhere I want to go – quickly and cheaply - on a train or a bus. Over the coming months I’ll be filing regular dispatches about life, politics and voting in New York City to further explore SF-NYC differences.

Upon arrival in the Big Apple last April I joined the LWVNYC and attended my fist committee meeting a month later. The LWVNYC is familiar to me in many ways – everyone I have met is intelligent and passionate and committed. The League office is exactly what I’m used to - a couple rooms packed with papers and people. It’s perfect.

The most pressing topic I have encountered working with the LWVNYC is the city’s Charter Revision Committee. This is a slightly complicated, never-in-SF story. When Mayor Bloomberg was reaching the end of his 2nd term and was facing unemployment due to term limits he got creative and, with the help of the city’s legislature, got himself an opportunity for a 3rd term. This somewhat backfired on the mayor when his popularity sank and he was reelected by a surprisingly narrow margin.

Term limits have remained an issue for the Mayor. The terms of elected officials for the city are set out in the City Charter. Only the NY State legislature or NYC voters can change the Charter, through a signature drive or through ballot recommendations by a Charter Revision Committee – a body created and appointed by the Mayor. The Mayor created the Commission last March and tasked it with reviewing the entire charter, holding public meetings, creating recommendations and then creating ballot measures for the November ballot.

Let me just stop here to analyze this situation from a San Francisco point of view. The commission had only 9 months to review the entire charter – the basis for New York City’s government, – seek input from the public in all 5 boroughs and then analyze all the information and craft ballot measures. This process would have broken pretty much every law in San Francisco’s Sunshine Ordinance including meetings that were announced a few days before they happened, agendas that were open ended or nonexistent, unclear public speaking opportunities and many, many meetings closed to the public. In SF, this process would have taken years and produced practically nothing but we would have known what was happening the whole time.

Part of me is really excited to see how quickly things move here. I like the idea of identifying a problem and solving it. I also like the idea of a strong mayor, someone who can get things done quickly but also is held accountable. Well, that is until I learned that Mayor Bloomberg had two charter issues he wanted discussed and it looks like they will be the only issues on the ballot next November (it’s so convenient that he was able to appoint all members of the commission). There was lots of good input on changes needed in the charter, including direct testimony from the LWVNYC but, as of now, not one will make the ballot. Ahhh…it’s going to be interesting.

The Mechanics of Voting

There have been a couple of recent discussions at the LWVNYC that will be familiar to my friends at the LWVSF. The first is a switch to new voting machines rolling out for this September’s primary. These are optical scanner machines similar to the ones used in San Francisco – use the black pen to fill in the space, hand the paper to the worker, hope your vote is counted. I do think this is an improvement over the old machines used in New York City which had a privacy curtain and levers for each candidate; it was an experience I wish I hadn’t missed!?! One of my fellow committee members said that not only was there no paper trail but the vote totals were listed on the back of each machine. At the end of Election Day, the poll workers turned around each machine and wrote down the totals. She said she was a poll observer one year and watched an older woman with bad eyesight incorrectly read off vote numbers. I’m sure everyone will agree that optical machines are better than that!

Finally, ranked choice voting seems to be on its way to NYC. We had a couple discussions on how it works and even though I had official training I’m still confused by over-votes and under-votes. How embarrassing!

I have started some personal lists… Cool things about NYC:

1. Cars in NYC cannot make any turn on red. Crossing the street is so much easier when I don’t have to worry about a car sliding through a red light and into my kids. (Unless it’s an out-of-towner.)
2. Summer.
3. Subways.

Uncool things about NYC:

1. No composting + no garbage disposals = smelly, smelly garbage.
2. Parking worse than North Beach on a Saturday night.

Celebrity sightings:

1. Liam Neesan’s back in Central Park (my cousin swears it was him -- I did notice how nice his shoulders looked).
2. 2. Ben Stiller’s father (known in some circles as Jerry Stiller, or Anne Meara’s husband).

Making the most of their New York City experience, the Chu family visited the Intrepid, an aircraft carrier and museum docked on the Hudson River.