Years After It Was Abolished, a City Board Lives On

By SAM ROBERTS

The city's Board of Estimate, an omnipotent body composed of the five borough presidents and three citywide elected officials, was gaveled to order for the last time on Aug. 27, 1990. But anybody who spends time delving into the city's administrative code - there are people like this - knows that the board lives on in scores of references in the directory.

According to the code, fees for dumping construction waste are still set by the board. So are provisions of the municipal employee pension funds. The parks commissioner can rent the “stadium in Flushing Meadow Park” if the board grants permission. The sanitation commissioner can sell ashes with the board's approval. The city archivist is still supposed to provide assistance to the board “in connection with problems of municipal administration and proposed legislation.”

The board remains empowered, according to the code, to, among other things, contract with mass transportation providers for reduced fares for New Yorkers older than 65, to define boundaries in property disputes between the city and private landlords, and to authorize the stringing power lines above ground when the board deems it “impracticable to place and operate the conductors advantageously underground.”

Of the 150 references to the board in the administrative code alone, some describe actions that had been taken by the board before it was abolished and others refer to the board “or its successor.” But many read as if the board still existed.

Complying with a United States Supreme Court ruling that the board violated the one-person, one-vote principal (since the borough presidents, representing counties with divergent populations, had equal votes), a charter revision commission recommended the board's abolition. In 1989, the voters agreed. Most of the powers were transferred to the City Council. References to th e board still exist in the City Charter itself, although the revised charter's abolition of the board presumably takes precedence legally.

Amending the administrative code of city rules and regulations is the Council's job. The Council has been doing just that, but on a case-by-case basis as legislation on a particular subject is drafted. When two local laws on recycling were amended in 2010, for example, references to the Board of Estimate were removed.

Peter F. Vallone, the former Council speaker, recalls that in 1990, legislation was drafted to remove all anachronistic references to “the board” and replace them with “the Council” or another relevant agency or body. For reasons nobody seemed able to explain, that legislation was never approved.

So 22 years after the last vote on its 580-item calendar - a proposal to expand a United Parcel Service warehouse in Lower Manhattan - and Frank New, sitting in for Mayor David N. Dinkins, gaveled the board into terminal adjournment, it survives on paper.

“Of all the relics in city government, the board and its name conjure an era when county party machines delivered patronage and corruption through the county leaders' control of the borough presidents' votes on the board,” said Richard D. Emery, a civil rights and liberties lawyer who filed the successful suit to eliminate the estimate board on behalf of several Brooklynites. “Continued references to the board in regulations and other city laws should remind us of just how far we have come.”

Those archaic references may eventually be excised at the recommendation of another body, drably named the Report and Advisory Board Review Commission, which was created by another City Charter revision referendum in 2010 to eliminate outdated or redundant government functions. The board met for the first time in February and held its first hearing in May after identifying 14 reports and 7 advisory boards that seemed ripe for elimination. Its purview could also include anachronistic references to defunct city agencies, like the Board of Estimate.

Its proposed hit list included a sprinkling of obscure boards, like the city's Tattoo Regulation Advisory Committee and the Inter-Agency Advisory Council on Towing, but also others like the Arson Strike Force that may have outlived their original agenda.

Not everyone agreed. The Finance Department's annual report on the Industrial and Commercial Incentive Program should be retained, one witness testified, because even though the program has been scrapped, 8,000 properties still receive tax breaks authorized by it.

Other witnesses objected to the proposed elimination of reports on school class size, the use of temporary classrooms, the preliminary version of the mayor's management report, a zoning and planning report and the scrapping of the Consumers Council on the grounds that it is redundant to “industry association meeti ngs, meetings of community boards, BIDs, Chambers of Commerce, and social media.”

The 2010 charter revision commission recalled that an earlier commission had explored the issue of outdated reports and advisory commissions because it was “concerned that the continued production of unnecessary reports may be a waste of time and resources for strapped agencies.” Two experts were recruited to examine the usefulness of 33 charter-mandated reports. They could not even find 13 of them, the commission said, and others “were not widely used or familiar to either the public or city managers.”

The 2010 charter drafters recommended creation of a commission composed of representatives of the mayor and the City Council to decide which reports and commissions could be waived. The Council may approve or disapprove the recommendations.

Elizabeth Weinstein, who directs the mayor's office of operations and heads the panel, said it had “broad authority to look at every report and body over a five-year period. We wanted to start with a relatively limited list. We asked city agencies to talk to us about reports or bodies that were no long as impactful as they had been.”