A dollar doesn't buy much these days...forty minutes at a parking meter, a can of soda, a bagel from the street vendor....It does however make a difference in how you get married in New York. Straight couples are charged a dollar less ($35 vs. $36) than those in domestic partnerships. The marriage license fees are different due to the different bureaucracies from which they came, nothing intentional about it. Yet it should be evened out and now the Mayor is on the case.
From The NY Times:
The reason for the $1 discrepancy lies in the way that the two fees evolved. In New York City, marriage fees are administered by the City Clerk; in the rest of the state, they are administered by the state’s Department of Health. In 2002, an effort to increase the marriage fee in New York City was defeated in the budget process. The state was able to increase their fee to $40 (the result of which is you effectively get a 10 percent discount for filing within the city).
In contrast, domestic partnership registration fees are set by the city. At the same time of the budget process, the City Clerk asked the Office of Management and Budget to determine mathematically a fair fee for domestic partnership registration, one that encompassed processing and other costs. The result? $36.
The process of achieving fee parity is expected to take several months, the mayor’s office said.
Meanwhile, a reader noted (in response to City Room’s doomed wedding wall post) that domestic partnerships are treated differently from marriages. For one, there is no mandatory 24-hour waiting period. Secondly, no wedding ceremony is required.
I guess there are pros and cons to everything, but we should still work to put everything on an even playing field
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