Some residents, parents, and anti-mayoral control activists have proposed bringing the issue to a vote; giving registered voters in the City of Rochester the ultimate power to decide whether the school district should be merged with City Hall. The current debate is being driven, some argue, by community and business leaders who don't live in the city or don't have children attending city schools. | A vote isn't entirely impossible, but close, says Jay Worona, general counsel for the New York State School Boards Association. | The large urban school districts in New York were departments of city governments until 1917, he says. When state legislators made the Big Five districts autonomous from their city governments, Worona says, they made no provision for how to change the governance of those districts. In other words, the power to call for a vote does not exist. The only way to change that is to change the law, Worona says. | State Senator Joe Robach is among those who have stated that the public should be able to vote on mayoral control.