A statewide ballot proposal to safeguard rights for women and other minorities passed on Tuesday night. At the same time, four out of five City Charter changes proposed by a panel convened by Mayor Eric Adams also appeared to prevail, according to results from state and city election boards.
Proposal 1, known as the Equal Rights Amendment, was on ballots across New York State. The measure enshrines abortion rights in the state constitution. It also sought to codify in the constitution protection against unequal treatment based on national origin, ethnicity, age, disability and sex (including sexual orientation, gender identity, and pregnancy status).
“Yes” prevailed at over 77% of votes cast in New York City and about 58% statewide, as of 11 p.m.
“Tonight, New Yorkers stood up for women and LGBT, immigrant and disabled New Yorkers by approving the most progressive and comprehensive state Equal Rights Amendment in the country,” Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
Four ballot provisions in New York City, proposed by a controversial charter-revision panel convened by Adams, passed with smaller margins.
One of those measures codifies certain powers of the Department of Sanitation, including allowing it to require waste to be put into containers for pickup.
Another requires the publication of capital planning reports on the cost of maintaining city facilities.
The remaining two add procedural hurdles for the City Council before it passes legislation — one requiring multi-step review for proposed new public safety measures, and the other expanding budgetary reviews prior to votes on new legislation.
The one Adams panel measure that failed, with just 47% of voters in favor, would have institutionalized the role of “chief business diversity officer,” given the mayor control over film permits and combine archive boards.
Together, the proposals give more control to the mayor and were criticized by most members of the City Council. By convening the charter revision commission that proposed the ballot items, Adams preempted the Council’s own attempt to convene a charter commission to get its own proposals on the ballot this year.
Some critics said the charter review process was rushed, noting that past charter reviews took place over a long period of time — nearly a year for the 2019 charter review — while the one this year took just over two months.
Speaker Adrienne Adams (D-Queens) actively campaigned against the mayoral proposals, criticizing the process on television and urging voters on her personal social media accounts to “vote NO to proposals 2 through 6!.”
Dozens of other Council members joined the pushback effort, in partnership with a coalition of about 50 civil rights and groups that spent more than $218,000 on mailers, internet ads and other efforts to persuade voters to reject the proposals. They called the charter review process a “sham” and campaigned heavily against it, passing out fliers throughout the city. (That independent expenditure group’s membership includes Mark Winston Griffith, a board member of THE CITY.)
The Adams administration focused on education about the initiatives, urging voters to flip their ballot — using videos of flipped pancakes and bagels but not expressing an opinion on how to vote.
A spokesperson for the mayor, Frank Dwyer, told THE CITY the ads ran online, as well as in 40 print and digital newspapers and radio stations, and also appeared in six languages.
Members of the council’s progressive caucus said in a statement late Tuesday that they “are deeply disappointed by the passage of Proposals 2-5.”
“These undemocratic measures were pushed by the mayor and his special-interest-filled commission in the dead of summer with little public input,” they said. “They fail to make our city safer, cleaner, or more accessible.”
