Mayor Amicone and Term Limits
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- February
- 10
Mayor Phil Amicone of Yonkers says he is philosophically against term limits, but if the city council should vote to do away with them—which they are threatening to do—then he would “in all likelihood” veto it because the citizenry wants term limits.
Last Sunday’s column was about the recent flirtation with abolishing terms limits, which were upheld twice in voter referendums. However, it wasn’t clear how the mayor felt about the issue—and I nailed him down yesterday.
“I don’t support them,” he said of term limits. “But people voted twice.”
Amicone echoed the thrust of the column when he said that term limits “are a lazy man’s way of not having to vote.”
The mayor said the opportunity for throwing a bad politician out of office comes on election day. But with terms limits, he said, “Why would you artificially get rid of somebody you can want to keep—whether it’s a council member or a mayor? So, I don’t think term limits make any sense. Certainly at the local level, they make no sense at all.
Amicone said he would rather see the issue resolved in another referendum, if that’s possible, instead of allowing it to be decided legislatively.
In any case, the two-term mayor added, “I’m certainly not looking to run again.”
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 12:26 pm by Phil Reisman.
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Phil Reisman is a veteran journalist and native of Westchester County. He began his career in 1977 as the head copy boy of a startup New York City newspaper that quickly went belly up. Reisman was not to blame for the newspaper's failure, or so he claims.
