By Dan Murphy
Many times in politics, the barriers that New York State Election Law places on candidates and organizations to collect enough valid signatures to get on the ballot has resulted in many candidates and causes never getting out of the starting gate.
Ever since the council vote and mayor’s signature on legislation modifying term limits for the mayor and city councilmembers was extended from eight years to 12 years, an organization called Yonkers Committee for Term Limits Consistency worked to get the people of Yonkers, through a referendum, to decide on whether term limits should be modified.
The group had five weeks from the date of the council vote, Oct. 29, or when the mayor signed the legislation, Nov. 2, depending on what legal opinion you agree with, to collect more than 4,700 valid signatures of Yonkers registered voters.
According to the dates above, the last day to submit petitions was Dec. 13. Others disagreed and the petitions continued to circulate until Dec. 20 and, according to City Council President Mike Khader on Dec. 20: “I received two volumes of petitions with approximately 3,475 signatures delivered to me at my home. Upon receipt, I immediately contacted the City Clerk to alert him that I was in possession of the petitions. Subsequently, the filer of the petitions requested that they be withdrawn; accordingly, there will be no further action by the Office of the City Council President or the city clerk.”
The fact that not enough signatures were collected can be attributed to a few different reasons, depending on your political persuasion: Yes, the petitions had to be collected during the holiday season, when most of our time is occupied with things other than politics; and the cold weather didn’t help those collecting signatures.
But supporters of the decision to modify term limits can point to the fact that if the Committee for Term Limits Consistency was unable to collect 4,700 signatures, then the supposed public outcry over the decision by the City Council to extend terms for another four years doesn’t exist.
Some also believe that some of the statements from the Committee for Term Limits Consistency, made in the days before the council vote, now appear a bit over the top, based on the fact that they couldn’t collect the required number of signatures.
In a release from October titled “The Yonkers Committee for Term Limits Consistency asks the council ‘Why is it Afraid of the Public?’” the group claimed that back in 2012 it submitted more than 4,000 signatures for a similar referendum on extending term limits, but blamed then-City Clerk Jose Alvarado and Deputy Clerk Vincent Spano for “working with the corporation counsel from the Mike Spano administration” and becoming hyper-technical and invalidated some. “The council could have put the issue on the ballot regardless of the signatures and chose not to. Two of those council members have carried the water for the same Spano administration and have introduced a resolution to change term limits legislatively despite the fact that the voters of this city twice voted for term limits.”
The group continued their attacks on now City Clerk Vincent Spano, writing that they were concerned that it would be the city clerk who would rule on the validity of the petitions now, writing it will be “the same Vinny Spano that aided and abetted in the invalidation of the signatures we collected seven years ago.”
But the chaos that ensued over the final days of collecting and submitting and then pulling back the petitions had nothing to do with the city clerk, because he never got the petitions to review then and count them.
Instead of going to City Hall hours before closing at 430 p.m. (City Clerk Vincent Spano waited after 430 with Deputy City Clerk Mike Ramondelli but no petitions were filed), the petitions were attempted to be filed with the Corporation Counsel’s Office, who does not have the right to accept petitions.
So the group then went to the home of Khader and asked him to accept them. Eventually, it was determined that there were not enough valid signatures to pass muster, so the petitions were taken back from Khader and never filed.
That this group involved Khader, who played no role in the attempt to collect signatures and get the issue of extending term limits on the ballot, when the petitions were not enough and eventually withdrawn, seems nonsensical.
Furthermore, the petitions never made it to the city clerk; he never reviewed them and never made a determination on them, because they never made it to his desk. To accuse him of impropriety and then not file any petitions seems wrong.
This ends the drama of trying to get modifications to term limits on the ballot for this November. We wrote in detail about these recent events and modifying term limits over the past few months because of the importance it holds for the people of Yonkers. Now the matter is closed, in our view, with the more important question moving forward: Who, if any candidates, will step forward to run for mayor and City Council? That election is 10 months away.
