Voting Rights, Home Rule, and Metropolitan Governance: The Secession of Staten Island As a Case Study in the Dilemmas of Local Self-Determination
Abstract
On January 1, 1898, amid fanfare and celebration, the city of Greater New York – "the greatest experiment in municipal government the world has ever known" – was born. The consolidation of the cities, counties, and towns on the New York State side of New York Harbor into one great metropolis was a capstone to one century of rapid economic and population growth and a fitting harbinger of a new century of urban greatness for the region and, indeed, the nation. Now, with another century mark approaching, there is a distinct possibility that the City of New York, already beset by a host of economic and social ills, may not make it to its own centennial intact. The New York State legislature has authorized the residents of one of the five boroughs – Staten Island – to initiate a process of secession and incorporation into a separate city of their own. The secession of Staten Island has elicited a host of divergent reactions, ranging from the hyperbolic to the humorous. The proponents of secession, seeing themselves currently relegated to a "neo-colonial status" by an inattentive City government, dot their manifestoes with references to the American Revolution, Lithuania, the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain, and "the tide of freedom . rolling across Europe and Asia."' New York City's Mayor Dinkins has warned of secession as "a step into the night, along a treacherous and foggy path that has never been taken." Many press accounts, by contrast, have found the matter risible, labeling Staten Island's move a "sitcom secession" and conjuring up images of Fort Sumter on the Hudson and City troops charging across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge from Brooklyn to put down the rebellion of the "Confederate States of New York."
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