Ryan Frank says that the claim by opponents that Curiously-Strong Mayor would “allow the mayor to sell parkland and other public property without a vote of the city council” is “not factually wrong but it is in fact highly misleading”. And he’s certainly right. But then he goes on to provide a description of the proposal’s changes that itself isn’t quite as clear as it could be.
Under the current government, it takes four of five votes to sell city property. Under the new form, the mayor would need three votes to declare property eligible for sale, then he’d have sole authority to determine who to sell the land to and at what price.
In other words, the mayor is getting a lot more power to determine the terms of a sale but he still would have to get the idea of a land sale through council.
While it might be fair to describe a 3-of-5 vote in favor of declaring a piece of City property to be “no longer needed for public use” to be functionally equivalent to declaring it to be “eligible for sale”, it’s a little confusing to say that Council would have to agree to “the idea of a land sale” — not because Ryan doesn’t understand, but simply because that particular choice of words sounds like the Council gets to weigh in on a particular sale, which isn’t the case.
Of course, I walked this through just recently, so I won’t rehash it.
Suffice it to say that the way it would work under Curiously-Strong Mayor is that Council would only be allowed to make a very general “we don’t need this property anymore” decision. But only the mayor would have any say over actually selling such property — as well as the all-important specifics (buyer, terms, method) of an actual sale.
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