Term Limits: Voters' Call

We've always been dubious about the wisdom of placing term limits on elected officials. At the same time, if the city's Term Limits Law is to be overturned or amended, we do not believe it should be done in a collaboration between the City Council and Mayor Bloomberg. What was done by the voters should be undone by the voters.

The law was first approved in 1993 in a referendum, and the public affirmed its decision three years later. The driving force behind the measure here was Ron Lauder, a wealthy cosmetics executive who ran a failed race for Mayor in 1989.

The idea of term limits has had appeal here and in some other parts of the nation to voters who are frustrated by government action or inaction and believe that one problem is that elected officials remain in office so long that they either lose touch with their constituents or become captive to special interests whose large campaign contributions can help keep them there.

Our feeling, however, is that those officials who are not doing their jobs properly can be held accountable by the voters through the regular election system, and those voters should not be deprived of a representative whose work they are satisfied with because of a time limit on how long someone can serve.

Dealing with the specifics of the city's law, a case might be made that voters as a whole do not pay enough attention to what their City Council Members are doing in office — or receive enough information about their performance from the news media — to make reasoned judgments about the quality of their work. That belief could lead to the conclusion that the electorate is voting for familiar names rather than on merit.

That is certainly not the case for Mayor, however. Citizens with an interest in government and politics don't have to search hard for information about what the city's chief executive is doing. Nor was there any evidence prior to the passage of the term limits law that they were reluctant to turn out incumbents due to familiarity.

Our last three-term Mayor, Ed Koch, was denied a fourth one in 1989 because revelations of corruption among some of his closest political allies early in his third term combined with doubts about his ability to deal with growing racial tensions following the murder of a young black man who was set upon by a white mob in Bensonhurst to convince voters he no longer was the best candidate for the job.

The previous three-term Mayor, Robert Wagner, left office after 1965 and then was persuaded to run again in the 1969 election. Voter unhappiness with the man who replaced him, John Lindsay, did not produce a torrent of nostalgia for the Wagner years, however, and he lost his own party's primary.

Mr. Bloomberg earlier in his administration steadfastly opposed a modification of the term limits law, such as what is currently being proposed: keeping the law but granting elected officials the right to serve three four-year terms rather than the current maximum of two.

The Mayor has given new meaning to the image of someone faced with the end of his term as a lame duck, since ducks are known for propelling themselves forward without much apparent effort through furious activity below the water's surface. As with his shadow campaign for President, which was carried forward energetically by a Deputy Mayor with a unique job portfolio even as Mr. Bloomberg disclaimed any interest in making a run, the Mayor is trying to have it both ways on term limits. On the one hand, he continues to insist he will retire from government at the end of 2009; on the other, he had dinner with the publishers of the city's three major general-interest dailies to see whether they might consider supporting an amendment to the law to permit a third mayoral term.

Much as we're inclined to endorse such a change, we believe it would be a grievous mistake to simply have the Council pass a bill which would then be signed by Mr. Bloomberg.

A far better idea is the measure just proposed by Queens City Councilman David Weprin that would call for a voter referendum on the issue. Judging by the number of good-government groups that have lined up to support that bill — as well as the organization started by Mr. Lauder — it might actually have a chance of winning public approval.

That is no certainty, of course. Nor is it clear that the bill could be placed before the voters in time to permit those whose terms are supposed to lapse at the end of next year to run one more time, Mr. Bloomberg included.

But it is the fairest and most-democratic way to deal with the issue, something that is particularly important given that the measure is being introduced more than halfway through the four-year election cycle.

Candidates who have been raising money to seek higher office on the assumption that the incumbents would have to vacate their posts would have a right to feel aggrieved, as would those who have contributed to their campaigns. And so any change in term limits that affects the 2009 election is going to be controversial, with legitimate outcries about the rules being changed well past the middle of the game.

That is all the more reason for the Mayor and Council Speaker Christine Quinn to resist whatever temptation they feel to maneuver a term limits amendment through without voter involvement. If they don't, they might find themselves caught in a backlash from which their own achievements in office won't shield them.