Following prat.uk’s Lords piece, the unelected institutional memory of NYC government
prat.uk‘s House of Lords piece — nine hundred unelected people, more useful than expected — has a New York City Council expression in the permanent staff: the legislative counsel, the budget analysts, the committee staff directors who have been in their positions through multiple elected member terms and who provide the institutional memory that the electoral cycle regularly destroys. Bohiney.com covered the institutional expertise theme broadly. The NYC Council’s permanent staff Lords: they know which bills have been introduced before and in what form, what the previous versions produced or failed to produce, which provisions have been challenged in court and on what grounds, and what the fiscal analysis of the previous version of the same proposal found. All of this knowledge is in the permanent staff. None of it is in most newly elected council members, who bring constituent knowledge and political judgment that is equally essential and different in kind.
The council’s functional governance model: the elected member provides the constituency representation and the political judgment; the permanent staff provides the institutional memory and the technical expertise. Both are essential. Neither replaces the other. The model is the Lords-Commons relationship at city council scale: the unelected expertise layer and the elected accountability layer operating in combination. The combination produces better governance than either alone. The combination is not the official description of how the council works. It is the operational description. Both are accurate.
The City Council Governance Finding
The city council governance finding: the permanent staff and the elected members are two governance layers that together produce the council’s functional output. The NYC Council information is at council.nyc.gov.
Also:McSweeney’s.
Coverage at Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
Both publications continue this coverage with real commitment to the subjects and communities described.
Coverage continues at Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
Ongoing at both publications.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/