In an outrageous bid to grab more power — but not an ounce of added accountability — City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and her lefty allies are seeking a council veto over top-ranked mayoral hires.
For a sign of how they’d use that power, look no farther than the progressives’ push to nix the confirmation of Randy Mastro as corporate counsel, the top job at the city Law Department.
Look: The mayor is elected citywide to run the city; he (or, someday, she) deserves his own choices to run city agencies.
And the council’s existing powers of oversight and investigation are more than enough check against any abuse — coming, as it does, on top of the mayoral power to fire any agency chiefs who fail at their jobs.
The council’s members, by contrast, are elected only in their own districts — and even then, the real race is only in a low-turnout Democratic (or, in a few cases, Republican) primary.
Most average New Yorkers don’t even know the name of their council rep.
All of which is why the City Charter gives the council a very limited role in local government.
Heck, it only gained the right to veto a nominee to head the Law Department because then-Mayor Bill de Blasio foolishly agreed in 2019 to support amending the Charter to allow it.
The correct reform to make now would be undoing that 2019 change: Mastro, a centrist Democrat who happily (and ably) served as a deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani and is now one of the top lawyers in the entire city, is eminently qualified for the job.
Those resisting him only want to force Mayor Adams to choose a hard progressive who’d serve their agenda rather than his.
Adams needs to shut this power grab down hard.
Indeed, he has the right to appoint a Charter Reform Commission to put his own charter amendments before the voters.
He ought to use that power to try for a rollback of the 2019 change — and maybe more.
Fact is, the City Council as an institution is becoming a growing source of dysfunction in city government: An Adams reform commission could and should look at retooling the council completely.
