Blog: Big Ideas

While New York State is working to turn Stewart Airport in Newburgh into the region's fourth major airport, New York magazine and SHoP Architects envisioned a creative, more radical idea: decentralizing airport functions except for the actual airplane operations throughout the city. Passengers would check in or claim luggage at sites around NYC and Jersey, then ride a high speed train directly to the plane.

There are plenty of probably unrealistic details to the plan - where would there be space around Grand Central for a major ticketing and baggage claim concourse? - not to mention the expense of building the rail loop, but this is cool thinking outside the box. If we were to designing a major city from scratch today, why be shackled with conventional expectations about what an airport is?

Mark Schmitt lays out a few big problems with the Reform Ohio Now redistricting proposal, and with nonpartisan redistricting plans in general. He suggests that the only redistricting plans worth pursuing are much more radical than what's being proposed today. He uses this as an argument for why we should focus on campaign finance reform instead, but thinking about redistricting a little more, what kinds of proposals ought we to consider?

One alternative, and the example Schmitt uses, is multi-member districts with Instant Runoff Voting. But I've always found the idea of districts itself to be so arbitrary. Why should any set group of people be forced to share a representative? I keep remembering one suggestion made by Professor De La Paz at the end of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, when he cautions the new Lunar congress against blindly adopting the mechanics of existing democracies. One of the Prof's suggestions is to let anyone who can collect a certain number of chops (signatures) be in the Congress. Of course this number would have to be very large if Congress were to not grow - a quick spot check suggests most Congressional elections receive about 150,000 to 250,000 votes, so what if a candidate simply needed to gather 200,000 signatures?

Here is one way this could work: for a set period of time each election, say six months, all eligible voters can register somewhere their preferences. Technology can greatly facilitate this. A voter can change his or her vote at any time, and the most current vote totals for all candidates would be regularly published. At the end, any candidate having more than the necessary number of votes is elected. At the end of the period, all the people who voted for a losing candidate could participate in a more classic balloting election, perhaps as one nationwide superdistrict with IRV, to select the remaining representatives needed to bring the total to 435. With such a system, it wouldn't matter where one lived. A large group of people sharing any common interest, background, or issue could pool their influence into a seat in Congress.

What would be the effects of such a system? For one, we would see more representatives elected around a specific issue. In a sense this would make the system more akin to parliamentary systems with many parties. Would the effect of money become greater or less? On the one hand, each candidate has to appeal directly to hundreds of thousands of voters, and money makes that easier; on the other hand, a candidate would not necessarily need to get a broad message out to the faceless general public, allowing a well-organized constituency to directly elect a representative rather than what they have to do today, raise a large amount of money and target it to a race even when their issue is not the primary concern of most of that district's voters.

Radical idea? Yes. Crazy idea? Maybe. Bad idea? I don't know.

A large amount of freight traffic to Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island is currently driven by truck along Canal Street in Manhattan, an area that hardly needs more traffic. So area Congressman Jerry Nadler has been pushing for years a plan to construct a rail tunnel between southern Jersey City and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, allowing more cargo to be transferred to trucks in Queens and Brooklyn or taken farther out on Long Island by rail. Nadler's district also includes a small part of Brooklyn, which just happens to include the very spot where the tunnel would go.

The recent transportation spending bill (with the silly name of TEA-LU) includes $100 million toward the project.

Here's the DEIS (various PDFs) including a very interesting map of frieght lines in and around the city.

I guess it wouldn't have made any sense to route the tunnel via Lower Manhattan, build a passenger station, and use it for combined passenger and freight service, with freight moving outside rush hours? That was my first reaction, but clearly it would be much more expensive than the freight-only tunnel and would limit the amount of freight capacity.

Cosmopolity's favorite City Councilperson, Gale Brewer, recently got a pile of bad PR for suggesting that the Council could extend term limits - currently two terms for all city offices, which kicked in in 2001 - without going back to the voters who originally approved a referendum to impose the limits and then defeated subsequent attempts to soften the rules.

I honestly don't know what I think about this. On the one hand, the Council recently has been an ineffective check on the power of the Mayor, and longer serving members would have the ability to build up the connections and influence to do so. And there are some great people on the Council (like Brewer) who deserve to have their jobs for more than eight years.

On the other hand, the voters did pass this law, and it's unfair for an elected body to thwart their will without an actual repeal by referendum. Plus, we're seeing a lot of action from elected officials all of a sudden, from people like Gifford Miller, who's running for Mayor, and David Yassky, who after doing very little during the two years I lived in his district is now reportedly leading a faction to broker a deal on the trash disposal conflict, at the same time as he gears up to run for Congress.

What to do? I don't know, which is why Cosmopolity is planning to arrange a debate on this subject. But might there be some more creative solutions to this problem than just extending terms, solutions which allow voters to keep people they like while also empowering new faces to join the Council without having to overcome the huge advantage of incumbency?

For example, what if after two terms, a Councilperson had to receive 55% of the vote, not 50%, in order to win reelection? And then 60% for a fourth term? That way if the people of the Upper West Side really love Gale Brewer, they can keep her as their representative, but at the same time she can't simply rest on a constant power base. And if the incumbent doesn't achieve the requisite vote total, then there could be another later election in which the incumbent is forbidden to run. There are drawbacks to this, such as the high cost of running additional elections, and making sure there is enough time for new candidates to mount a campaign for the suddenly-vacant seat.

Or, perhaps we could force each Councilperson to gather a large number of signatures on a petition in advance of the election in order to be allowed to run despite term limits. With about 160,000 people per council district, perhaps running for a third term would require 10,000 signatures, a fourth term 15,000, and gradually increasing from there. This scheme has the danger that it would further strengthen political machines, who could help their candidates achieve the petition totals.

These two ideas might be great or terrible, and certainly each has some challenges that would need to be solved. But ultimately, might there be a similar way to gradually handicap candidates, so that they can continue to run beyond the current term limitations, but at the same time requiring more from them in each election?