This is a vestige of a time when localities needed adult supervision from state legislatures, and revenue-raising for government functions was done almost exclusively by state and federal governments. Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia had to battle Tammany Hall and its corruption — and used his support for President Franklin D. Roosevelt as leverage — to establish city government as a conduit for big chunks of New Deal funding. Still, whatever scraps now remain of the federal urban agenda are distributed mostly to the states.

But we no longer live in a time when Albany can say its custodianship is needed because the cities and towns are incompetent or corrupt. There is really no good reason today for a senator in far upstate Oswego to weigh in on a housing incentive deal on 57th Street in Manhattan.

We need to fix this out-of-whack balance of power and return more authority to New York, and to other cities. The most common way to change the state Constitution is for the Legislature to vote and for citizens to ratify the changes. This may work for some matters, but for obvious reasons, it is not a good vehicle for getting Albany to cede control.

The other way is a referendum, which comes automatically every 20 years, to ask voters if they want to convene a constitutional convention. If they approve, delegates are chosen at the next general election to consider amendments to the document. At the end of the process, changes must be approved by voters.

This periodic constitutional convention provision is really well designed because it acknowledges that reorganizing authority is not something the State Legislature would ever do willingly. But it has mostly been a dead letter in recent decades for fear that “good” provisions of our absurdly long Constitution (about seven times longer than the federal one) might be wiped out.

Today, however, there may be just the right alignment of interests for a push to give residents of New York City more say on issues in their neighborhoods. First, there is the obvious desire of the mayor and his allies to get Albany out of the way of progress. Mr. de Blasio will be on the ballot himself in 2017, when the convention will next be considered.

Governor Cuomo has reasons, too, for wanting to open up the state convention. In his 2010 campaign, his platform called for “a people’s convention” to enact electoral and anticorruption reforms. And his father, Mario, was the last governor to push hard for a convention, in 1997.

No doubt, a constitutional convention could be a messy business. But it may be the only way to bring order to the broken relationship between the mayor and the governor.