As we report in this issue, Council Member Oliver Koppell, who represents Norwood and part of Bedford Park, in addition to his Riverdale base, has emerged as the prime mover behind an effort to extend term limits for city elected officials from two four-year terms to three.

We are open to this concept.

But since voters ratified term limits twice, any changes are for the voters to decide, not Koppell or his Council colleagues who obviously have a self-interest in this matter.  

Our gripe here is not with Koppell’s record, who was also an effective assemblyman for more than two decades before his Council tenure.

What troubles us most is the last-minute nature of this effort. Koppell could have introduced this legislation last year or the year before. So, this strikes us as a bid to get it past voters with as little public input as possible.

It also threatens to extinguish a lively campaign already under way. For several months, candidates seeking to replace term-limited Council members have been firing up their campaigns, holding fund-raisers, launching Web sites, corralling supporters. (There are at least four announced candidates in Koppell’s district alone.) They made their decision to run knowing that the incumbent would be leaving.

Term limits opponents often cite democracy in their arguments; in essence, the reasoning goes,voters should be able to choose whomever they want to represent them. Fair enough.

But there’s also an underlying message that’s undemocratic. And that’s the belief that no one can adequately replace the incumbent. Usually this belief is only held by the incumbent.

Following the tragedies of Sept. 11, 2001, in the heat of an election campaign, outgoing Mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to engineer a mini term extension to April or May the following year. Who other than Rudy could help the city heal and get back on track? Well, as we fortunately were permitted to discover, a guy named Mike Bloomberg did just fine.

Now, egged on by some business-world big shots who also can’t imagine how the city will survive under anyone else, Mayor Bloomberg is flirting with extending term limits.

Koppell and Bloomberg would do well to listen to a mayor who understood his own role vis a vis the voters he was elected to represent.

“My friends, my friends, my brothers and my sisters, the people have spoken,” David Dinkins said on election night in 1993 as he conceded to Giuliani.  “They have. They have. And I respect their judgment. And I respect their decision. And we all must respect their judgment and their decision.”

He added: “You see, you see, my friends, elections come and go, candidates come and go, mayors come and go, but the life of a city must endure.”

It must, it has, and it most certainly will even as Oliver Koppell and Michael Bloomberg move on to the next productive stages of their lives.