Shout it from the rooftops: the City Council’s wicked local veto on land use is dead! This week, stridently anti-development Councilmember Vickie Paladino of Queens grudgingly gave her support to a proposed 248-unit housing plan in Bay Terrace, helping the rezoning sail through unanimously in the Council.

In an earlier era, Paladino would have killed this modest eight-story tower by virtue of the local veto (which is politely called “member deference”), through which a single member could say “no” to any project in her own district and the rest of the Council would agree to vote it down, a practice that was the norm for decades.

As Paladino herself put it in a video explaining her vote — in between fear-mongering about the supposed ills of the potentially lower-income tenants who could move into the development — she was swayed by the specter of the new........

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