Reform must start at grassroots level

After Assemblyman Sheldon Silver was arrested on corruption charges and forced to step down as speaker earlier this year, New Yorkers might have expected serious government reforms. Instead, we were treated to typical Albany theater, a package of bills that does little to change the status quo.

There is no reason to expect anything different now that the legislature’s other head, state Sen. Dean Skelos, has been arrested and forced to resign as majority leader. Most lawmakers aren’t even pretending to call for reform this time around.

The task falls to ordinary New Yorkers to end corruption and restore representative democracy. State law has a little-discussed mechanism in place for that kind of transformation, a constitutional convention, and voters get a chance to call for one every 20 years on the state ballot. The next automatic referendum will be in 2017.

We would do well to take advantage of the opportunity. There are a number of basic reforms that Albany has proven incapable of initiating, but which could see the light of day through a constitutional convention. Term limits would ensure no one stays in office long enough to become a modern-day Boss Tweed. 

Public financing of campaigns would disempower the lobbyists who have hampered good governance for years. Other tweaks could restore the deliberative process to a legislature often ruled by the fiat of the governor, Assembly speaker and Senate majority leader.

The time to start raising awareness of the convention is now. Groups from the Ben Franklin Club to Riverdale Senior Services’ Social Action Committee should educate members about the convention and do everything they can to make sure the referendum passes in two years.

Making elected officials delegates to the convention should be out of the question, since they will only pull their usual tricks. The last time that was proposed, in 1997, it was a non-starter.

Details of the convention will not be easy to sort out. But a grassroots effort to reform our government would follow the tradition started with the state’s first constitutional convention, in 1777.