Mark de Solla Price Testimony on October 12, 2008 Public Hearings on New York City Term Limits Legislation

Good evening. My name is Mark de Solla Price; it is a privilege to speak before you tonight and thank you for your perseverance at this late hour. I have lived in Manhattan since 1980 and live with my husband, Vinny Allegrini, in our small, rent-stabilized apartment in Greenwich Village since 1994. I’m speaking today in favor of extending current terms to being limited at three terms. I want to thank the Speaker Christine Quinn and City Council for the opportunity to hear from so many constituents like me.

Thirty years ago, U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey said that “...the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

I am one of those people in the shadows of life. I have been living with HIV/AIDS since 1983 and have been medically disabled for the last two years. Vinny is also living with AIDS and on disability, but he is mainly homebound these days, so today, I’ll be speaking on his behalf as well.

Vinny and I are two of more than 100,000 people in New York City who are living with HIV or AIDS. That’s approximately 1 out of every 70 people in this city. In my part of town, it’s one out of every four gay men who are HIV-positive.

And the folks most at risk in a time of great change are the more fragile members of our city, people like Vinny and me; our seniors, our children’s education, everyone’s healthcare and public safety.

Because our great city is the financial capital of the world, we are going to be one of those hardest hit by this once-in-a-generation financial crisis. It might well be a “perfect storm” of Wall Street losses, raising costs, escalating climate crisis and global political challenges.

Our city’s elected political leaders will have to make unprecedented budget cuts for the next few years at the very least. We are not talking about merely some belt-tightening, a little trimming of fat or downsizing some programs. From a budget point of view, you folks are going to have to do what would have been unimaginable, unthinkable and inhumane only a year ago. And then we’re all going to have to work together to make it work, somehow.

Rather than take a hatchet to our city budget and have across the board cuts in all our programs, we need a scalpel to cut what we must, and save what we can, to build our best future together. That scalpel needs to be wielded by the most qualified and the most experienced elected officials both in this room and in the mayor’s office.

So who are those scalpel wielding political surgeons? As we all know, not only is our Mayor facing term limits in 2009, so too are two-thirds of our City Council members. I ask you to think about what effect that would have in this emergency situation. Now is not the time for on-the-job training and getting new folks up to speed. When the voters instituted two-term limits, it may well have been a great idea, but they could not have possibly foreseen the circumstances that we’d be in today. Is this really the time we want to lose our city’s remarkable leadership?

Mayor Mike Bloomberg is a compassionate pragmatist, a non-partisan, a titan of business, and one of the best mayors that this city has had in my lifetime. Our City Council is experience and one of the most effective and functional that we’ve seen in years.

One of the problems with being a voice of the disabled is that I am disabled. It is difficult for me to have the stamina to be here today. There are a lot of voices like Vinny’s who are not able to be here today, and I ask that you listen to them too, even in their absence.

As a Unitarian Universalist and the Board of Trustees chair of The Community Church of New York, I feel that it is my moral duty to advocate for the inherent worth and dignity of every person and to promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations.

A true democracy is like alcoholics anonymous, where there aren't really any leaders just trusted servants acting on the group consensus. But the United States is a republic, where citizens select leaders who work for the good of those citizens, but those leaders make their own choices based on their personal intelligence, information and ethics and not necessarily the consensus view of their constituents. The most important, bold work can never be achieved just through popular consensus.

As a liberal democrat, I urge you to be republican today -- with a lower-case “r” -- and to do the bold thing that is most definitely in the best interests of the city and the voters by extending term limits in this time of crisis and opportunity.

Thank you.