Commissioner in a Car: The Resolutions on the Ballot in 2026

Now, what are resolutions? Resolutions are questions that go on the back of the ballot.

that voters have to approve.

A lot of laws that town boards or village boards or the county legislature pass have to be passed with approval of the electorate that is being served by them.

Sometimes it's an additional tax.

Sometimes it's a change in terms.

Sometimes it's a term limit, right? So we had a lot of talk about that over the last few years.

And sometimes it's the state legislature doing a constitutional amendment or charter change.

or an Onondaga County charter change.

So these things are one of the few ways where we have what's called direct democracy in New York State, where voters get to choose whether to support a law or not.

Normally, you see in California and a few other places, a lot of voter-initiated referendums, We don't have that in New York.

There's very few times where a voter petition can initiate a referendum that goes on the ballot.

We've actually seen a couple of those in Onondaga County recently.

One of the voter initiated referendums that is out there is the moving of a village from a March to a November election or, you know, to whatever election that they want to move to.

Um, so, uh, that is actually a voter initiated referendum.

Sometimes, sometimes it's the village board.

Sometimes it's, um, you know, uh, you know, a vote on the village board.

And sometimes it's a voter initiated referendum, depending on what we have.

And so we've seen that in Baldwinville and Fayetteville where they had this voter initiated referendum.

It's very rare.

Uh, most of the time.

The referendums that come on the ballot or the resolutions, those come on the ballot through an action of a political body, a town board, county legislature, or state legislature, and they transmit to us 90 days before the election, a resolution and a wording and all of that and it is put on the ballot and as you know we had a lot of talk about that with the term limits in onondaga county and i'm going to get to that in a little bit that's going to be the last thing i cover in the podcast um Yeah, you're going to have to stay for it, but it won't be that long because it is the most complicated one.

So I want to get to these other ones first.

So these other ones are only on in certain parts of the ballot because...

The two terms for the county legislature term limit or the county executive county controller term limits, Prop 1, Prop 2, they're going to go on every ballot.

There is no ballot from the state this year.