When does efficiency turn into bureaucracy?
City Council members and the Adams administration went head to head last week over that very question.
During a contentious Wednesday hearing, city lawmakers voiced their displeasure with a new City Hall policy requiring officials to fill out a form to request meetings with or action from agency leaders.
Council members said they were blindsided in April by the launch of the Elected Officials Agency Engagement Request portal, saying the process would upend the decades-old practice of lawmakers directly contacting department officials to request a meeting or seek help for a constituent issue. Even some members of the Adams administration think the form is a waste of time.
As Crain’s reporter Nick Garber noted in a recent article, critics accused the mayor of implementing the system as another form of micromanagement. But Tiffany Raspberry, Adams’ senior adviser and director of his intergovernmental affairs office, characterized it as an effort to streamline services, centralize requests and level the playing field to ensure that newly elected officials are not disadvantaged compared to government veterans with more extensive contact lists.
“The form is not intended to stand in the way of elected officials picking up the phone to reach out to a commissioner, borough commissioner or any other official in the administration,” said Raspberry.
City Councilman Lincoln Restler, however, reportedly questioned the Adams administration’s legal authority to weigh in on how the council interacts with agency leaders.
But officials might be a bit hasty in their dismissal of the new policy. Yes, Mayor Eric Adams has a reputation for getting involved in issues that don’t necessarily warrant his input. With everything from homelessness to rats wearing on the city, how lawmakers interact seems as if it should be the least of his worries. And it’s possible the new form would have had a smoother rollout if suggestions had been taken from the people who would be using it before it became a mandate.
However, cronyism and “playing politics” can be a drain on local government. Whether a department head answers a phone call or takes a meeting should not be a matter of friendship. If an official request policy can indeed ensure newer officials get the same amount of face time as those who are well seasoned at being in the right rooms, then it really doesn’t sound so oppressive.
Besides, lawmakers have teams of direct reports who already manage their calendar and could easily fill out the form for them. No doubt Restler, for example, who called the form “inane” and a “dangerous politicization of city government to prevent city agencies from doing their job based on the political whims of the mayor,” will not personally lose valuable working hours slaving over a Google doc.
Not every process that can be updated should be, of course. If the form is indeed used for gatekeeping by the administration or as a measure to slow down city agencies’ responses to requests from elected officials, that would be a major issue, and officials should work swiftly to have it scrapped.
But just because something has always been done a certain way doesn’t mean it always has to be. Attempting to make the meeting process more democratic seems like a noble task. City officials could benefit from giving the new process a fair shot to see if it achieves its intended benefits before dismissing it entirely.
The editors , 2024-05-06 12:03:04
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