Voters in the 30th Council District may find themselves turning a lot of levers in coming months because of an obscure rule in the City Charter.
Anthony Como, a Republican who won a razor-thin victory in the June 3 special election to fill ex-City Councilman Dennis Gallagher's seat for the rest of 2008, won't be in office for long before he faces another challenge.
There will be a primary in September and a general election in November to determine who will fill the seat for 2009. Another round of elections will be held the following fall for the full four-year term that starts in 2010.
The need for so many elections - each costing hundreds of thousands of dollars - has prompted several former and current elected officials to take a second look at the Charter rule.
"It is absolute nonsense to have a special election that doesn't fill out the term," said former Councilman Tom Ognibene, who ran against Como. "Running again in November is a waste of taxpayers' money."
The city Board of Elections does not yet have an exact cost for the 30th District race. A recent special election for a Brooklyn City Council seat cost $380,000, a spokeswoman said.
"You look at this - three elections in the span of a year and a half - and it clearly seems wasteful and redundant," said Councilman Eric Gioia. "There are quirks in the law that are unfortunate and need to be more closely examined."
The rule for multiple elections to fill a vacancy was put in place to decrease the power of political machines, one scholar noted.
County party bosses once hand-picked candidates to fill vacancies, but that was abandoned when the Board of Estimate was abolished in 1989 as a result of a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
"We regarded it as an undemocratic process," said Gerald Benjamin, who served as the principal research adviser for the Charter Commission. "We wanted competitive elections, nonpartisan elections, with easier ballot access."
Nonpartisan elections were established to fill vacancies as soon as possible, said Hofstra University Prof. Eric Lane.
"Holding a primary to fill a vacancy would have taken too long," said Lane, who served as chairman of the New York City Task Force on Charter Implementation in 1990. Despite the extra expense, "we judged that the democratic value of the proposed plan outweighed the cost."
To allow a special election winner in similar circumstances to complete the rest of the term, the Charter would have to be revised in a citywide referendum.
"Charter revisions are done all the time," said Richard Emery, the lawyer who argued against the Board of Estimate in the 1989 Supreme Court case.
