NY Times blog City Room: Call to Abolish Public Advocate’s Office Stirs Unease

I think we’d lose respect from other nations who consider the “ombudsman” part of their government a key to getting things done. After all we did not necessarily invent the structure of city government but it has been handed down through generations who have kept it despite changes in politics. The fundamental right to “redress” is provided by it, for example, going back to the so-called “Leisler’s Rebellion”. He was later found “not guilty” of turning over the City to the overwhelming British Navy and outnumbered in the Dutch fort, whose well was dry. Though hung, he was exonerated and they dug up his body from a paupers grave and paraded through the city streets. He had been hanged on the edge of the swamp that became the acres of tanning vats of the Roosevelt family. Fortunes were made there, but public investigation and mapping moved them further and further out of the city, to control disease, and not by official city planning. Call to Abolish Public Advocate’s Office Stirs Unease