New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin will back fresh legislation to compel the NYPD to establish formal protocols for deploying buffer zones around schools during protests — a push Menin said will sail through the council with more than enough votes to beat any effort from Mayor Zohran Mamdani to block it.

The move comes a month after Mamdani exercised his veto power — for the first and only time to date — in order to stop a similar bill from becoming law, even as he allowed another measure to establish police policy for buffer zones around houses of worship to go into effect. 

In his explanation of his decision to veto, Mamdani cited concerns from unions that the blocked measure could interfere with their demonstrations around college facilities, even though the proposal contained an explicit labor carveout.

In a press conference on Wednesday, Menin characterized this as a misunderstanding — one the new legislation will rectify by applying exclusively to early childhood education facilities and “most K-12 schools,” and “explicitly excluding libraries, teaching hospitals, colleges and universities.”

“That will more clearly focus the legislation on the most vulnerable students,” Menin told reporters. “These students were always at the core of the legislation.” 

Bronx Councilman Eric Dinowitz, chairman of the Jewish Caucus, introduced the first school security perimeter bill as part of a Menin-backed package of legislation to combat antisemitism. But sources told Jewish Insider that Manhattan Councilwoman Elsie Encarnacion will carry the new version.

Encarnacion’s office did not immediately reply to a JI request to confirm this.

Menin maintained that she had whipped enough votes to pass the original Dinowitz bill over Mamdani’s veto, but chose not to “jam through an override” while her colleagues had lingering qualms regarding higher education institutions. She also denied the new iteration represented a “watering-down” of the original proposal.

“What our weeks of conversation revealed was that there was a considerable number of members who wholly support the intent of the legislation, but who have concerns about which educational facilities are included,” she said. “We heard them, and now we’re choosing to address them rather than dismiss them.”

The mayor’s team said it would wait to review the text of the bill before weighing in.

“The Mamdani administration has not seen the specific legislative language, and we look forward to reviewing it,” Deputy Press Secretary Sam Raskin said. “The mayor believes New York City must remain a place where students can access their schools safely as well as exercise their constitutional right to protest.”