In its final session Tuesday, the lame-duck City Council is poised to pass a slew of last-minute bills that have received only scant public review. Are the members trying to belatedly justify the 32 percent pay hike they voted themselves last year?
It’d be one thing if they limited themselves to symbolic measures, like a resolution setting Jan. 30 as the Fred T. Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties, honoring a civil-rights activist. But the council can’t seem to stop there.
One bill, for example, aims to address the Halloween terror attack along the Hudson River bike path by mandating the placement of bollards in front of schools, plazas and busy sidewalks. That’s just ham-handed: Putting up barriers should be at the mayor’s discretion, with advice from his police and traffic commissioners.
Another dubious idea: ordering the Department of Education to report on its collection of gender-pronoun information. Do they really think city schools aren’t sufficiently obsessed with this stuff?
At least the mayor’s opposition moved Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito to pull her bill to boost food-truck and other street-vendor licenses: The next council can take a calm look at the idea, rather than rushing a plan through without public review.
Then again, Mayor de Blasio has already signed the online-voter-registration bill the council rushed through last week — though it’s likely invalid, since state law typically governs registration.
The worst of the last-minute rush remains the Right to Know Act, which at least reflects some of the NYPD’s complaints about earlier drafts. But it’s still a measure that shouldn’t be passed by a flock of lame ducks.
The council has passed nearly 700 bills under Mark-Viverito, easily twice the pace of the previous speakership of Chris Quinn. But quantity is the opposite of quality here: Bad laws make life harder for the New Yorkers the council supposedly aims to help.