New York City Council - History

History

The history of the New York City Council can be traced to Dutch colonial days when New York City was called New Amsterdam.

On February 2, 1653, the town of New Amsterdam, founded on the southern tip of Manhattan Island in 1625, was incorporated as a city under a charter issued by the Dutch West India Company. A Council of Legislators sat as the local lawmaking body and as a court of inferior jurisdiction.

During the 18th and 19th centuries the local legislature was called the Common Council and then the Board of Aldermen. In 1898 the amalgamation charter of the City of Greater New York renamed and revamped the Council and added a New York City Board of Estimate with certain administrative and financial powers. After a number of changes through the ensuing years, the present Council was born in 1938 under a new charter which instituted the Council as the sole legislative body and the New York City Board of Estimate as the chief administrative body. Certain functions of the Council, however, remained subject to the approval of the Board.

A system of proportional representation known as Single Transferable Voting seated a 26-member Council in 1938 to serve two-year terms. The term was extended to four years in 1945 to coincide with the term of the Mayor. Proportional representation was abolished in 1947. It was replaced by a system of electing one Council Member from each New York State Senate district within the city.

The Charter also provided for the election of two Council Members-at-large from each of the five boroughs. In June 1983, however, a federal court ruled that the 10 at-large seats violated the United States Constitution's one-person, one-vote mandate.

In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that the Board of Estimate also violated the one-person, one-vote mandate. In response, the new Charter abolished the Board of Estimate and provided for the redrawing of the Council district lines to increase minority representation on the Council. It also increased the number of Council Members from 35 to 51. The Council was then granted full power over the municipal budget, as well as authority over zoning, land use and franchises.

In 1993 the New York City Council voted to rename the position of President of the City Council to the Public Advocate. The Public Advocate presides over all stated meetings of the New York City Council. As the presiding officer, the Public Advocate is an ex officio member of all committees in the Council, and in that capacity has the right to introduce and co-sponsor legislation.

A two-term limit was imposed on City Council members and citywide elected officials after a 1993 referendum. The movement to introduce term limits was led by Ronald Lauder, a cosmetics heir. In 1996, voters turned down a Council proposal to extend term limits. Lauder spent $4 million on the two referendums.

In 2008, however, at the urging of Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who, like many Council members, would have exhausted his two terms in 2009), the Council voted 29-22 to extend this limit to three terms, after defeating (by a vote of 22-28 with one abstention) an amendment to submit the issue to public referendum. Legal challenges to the extension failed in Federal court, and a proposed law in the New York State Legislature to override the extension was not passed.