to be submitted to a referendum

to be submitted to a referendum On Tuesday evening, a commission charged with recommending Low Voltage Inverterpossible revisions of the City Charter will convene at Borough Hall in Brooklyn to hear testimony on the merits and demerits of term limits. This is the first of five “issue forums” it will hold on topics like voter participation, government structure, public integrity and land use.

Hang on; don’t turn the page yet. Granted, these are not the world’s sexiest matters. But the charter is the city’s constitution. Any fiddling with it has important consequences. So, to borrow from Arthur Miller, attention must be paid.

This is especially true of term limits, given how angered many New Yorkers were by the way Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and a slender Council majority, led by Speaker Christine C. Quinn, changed existing law to give themselves more time in office.

In case you need a refresher, New Yorkers voted twice in the 1990s to limit major elected officials in the city to two consecutive terms. But as Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Quinn were approaching the end of the line, they exploited the financial meltdown of 2008 to push through legislation overriding the people’s expressed will.

The city, they said, couldn’t possibly get along without them and such indispensable figures as the borough presidents and some do-nothing Council members.

With no small amount of arm-twisting, they got the Council to raise the limit to three terms, never mind poll results showing that New Yorkers overwhelmingly wanted any proposed change to be submitted to a referendum, as in the ’90s.

Voter outrage was evident. Despite outspending his main opponent by 12 to 1, Mr. Bloomberg barely won re-election last November. Four of the 29 Council members who self-servingly supported him on term limits were shown the door by voters, a high rejection rate for incumbents. Two others among the 29 were later charged with corruption. One has already gone to prison. Such is the stellar nature of one or two of the best lawmakers money could buy.

Like the man who came to dinner, the term limits issue doesn’t go away. It is now in the hands of the Charter Revision Commission, which has several tasks, one of which is to convince skeptical New Yorkers that it is not a wholly owned subsidiary of Mr. Bloomberg.