(As in September’s Democratic Primary, City’s editorial staff is divided on its endorsement for governor. Endorsements from both sides follow, with the staff majority first.)
Andrew Cuomo isn’t a perfect governor, and some of his shortcomings are as serious as his critics say. We, too, are disturbed by his meddling in the work of the Moreland Commission and by the way he has tried to avoid debates during the election. We’re troubled by his non-position on hydrofracking. Given the state’s extensive investigation into the process Cuomo ought to have developed a position by now. We suspect that he is amenable to fracking but doesn’t want to say so before the election.
We’re not fans of Cuomo’s campaign-period tax-rebate checks. And we question the wisdom of his Start-Up NY program. Why should one business receive subsidies and a similar, possibly competing business not get them? Why should employees of some businesses avoid paying state income taxes and not others? And given Cuomo’s clout, he could have taken more progressive stands on some issues: corporate welfare and economic inequality, for instance.
But his critics minimize the importance of many of his accomplishments, and those far outweigh his faults.
Under Cuomo, there has been a strong sense of competent, effective government, compared to his recent predecessors. And he has shown a unique ability to work with both parties in the State Legislature and get things done — including four on-time budgets.
Cuomo may be heavy-handed, but as many problems as that has created, it has resulted in some remarkable accomplishments. If he hadn’t been as forceful as he was on marriage equality and gun control, for instance, and if he hadn’t been as adept as he is in working with both Republicans and Democrats, those things wouldn’t have happened.
Cuomo has focused more on Upstate economic development than any recent governor, and the State Legislature is following his lead. We now have New York City legislators who talk as if they actually know where Upstate is.
And Cuomo’s Upstate efforts extend well beyond the Buffalo Billion. In the Town of Greece, for example, the state is building a nanotech facility that will be equipped for solar cell and semiconductor research and development. The state will own the property and equipment, but companies and their employees will use it. It’s a better approach than the traditional subsidies that the state would otherwise hand these companies to move here.
The governor has also made it a point to bolster some emerging food, beverage, and agricultural industries in Upstate New York. Recognizing the growth potential among the state’s breweries, wineries, and distilleries, the governor directed agencies to simplify permitting processes.
Cuomo’s record on education is a complex one. Like his recent predecessors, he hasn’t increased funding to the levels that many educators believe is needed. And he shares some views with education reformers that many teachers don’t like: he supports teacher evaluations that are linked to state tests, merit pay for exceptional teachers, and the Common Core. While he hasn’t been pro-union, he hasn’t tried to destroy the unions the way that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has. Cuomo has supported universal prekindergarten, and he wants to spend $2 billion over five years to upgrade school technology.
He has been a strong, eloquent supporter of women’s equality, and although unsuccessful, he fought hard for the adoption of the Women’s Equality Act, which he proposed. The Assembly has passed the entire 10-point bill, but the Senate passed nine and omitted the 10th point, so Cuomo hasn’t been able to sign any of it into law.
Nine of the act’s 10 points have not been controversial. They include provisions strengthening women’s rights to equality in the workplace and adding protections involving sexual harassment and domestic violence.
The 10th point, which Senate Republican leaders have refused to bring to a vote, would match state law with the protections established in Roe v. Wade. New York’s abortion laws predate that Supreme Court decision, and they omit a protection that would allow a woman to get an abortion past 24 weeks of pregnancy if her health is in danger.
That 10th point is crucial; if the Supreme Court throws out Roe v. Wade — not a remote possibility — a stronger New York law would guarantee protections that state law doesn’t provide now. And we are confident that Cuomo will continue to push for passage of those protections in his second term.
While we’re concerned about how Cuomo has dealt with fracking, and about his failure to adequately fund the Department of Environmental Conservation, he has had a reasonably good record on the environment. He called for reforming the brownfields program, although he could secure extension for only another year. And he and his administration have helped sound the alarm about climate change.
Climate change, in fact, has given Cuomo a chance to demonstrate another strength: his ability to respond well to a natural disaster, which he did when Superstorm Hurricane Sandy struck New York City.
And perhaps one of Andrew Cuomo’s most important strengths is one that is too often overlooked: he has not only managed significant accomplishments such as gun control and marriage equality, but he has done so in a large, complicated state. New York, as Cuomo pointed out recently, is extremely diverse. There are pockets of incredible wealth and high poverty. Its residents include multiple ethnic groups; passionate liberals and passionate conservatives; rural, suburban, and dense urban communities; Upstate and downstate.
State legislators represent small, often relatively homogenous populations. They can serve the narrow interests of their constituents. A governor, however, has to represent them all. Cuomo has done that while pushing the state in the right direction.
That’s more than enough reason to endorse him for another term.
His candidate for lieutenant governor is former Representative Kathy Hochul, who represented the Buffalo area well in her brief service from 2011 to 2013.
This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2014.
Wow! How hard did you guys have to hold your nose while writing this endorsement?
He represents Noone but his own self serving interests. 3 men control the entire 20 million slaves who live in New York. This is not how government was set up according to our Constitution. This is arrogance at its pinnacle and corruption to the highest order. Mr Como belongs in a prison cell.
Cuomo is the most corrupt politician in NY, by a LOT. He is currently under federal investigation for corrupting his “anti corruption” committee. This newspaper is a joke. http://online.wsj.com/articles/federal-investigation-looks-at-cuomo-and-moreland-commission-referrals-1407459680
Only the rich are unaffected by Cuomo’s law. They already have effective self protection, usually armed security. Others will suffer at the hands of nuts and felons. If you like being defenseless, vote democrat. if not vote Republican. Not complicated.
You write this like everyone was on board with his gun control scheme. I suggest you take a look at some of the front lawns upstate.
City is hopeless. You present yourself as some kind of objective truth squad for the media and then you go and gloss over or simply lie about what any non Republican does. Cuomo violated the NY constitution in order to pass the SAFE act, but that’s ok because City can’t bring itself to defend any aspect of legal gun use in NY, or really anywhere. If Pataki had strongarmed, bribed and made up new rules to ram through one of his pet projects, City would have rightly blasted him for it. No mention of the 400,000 and rising NY residents who have fled the kind of laws and policies Cuomo and City endorse. He might create some jobs in new tech that has failed before, but he certainly has driven out thousands of jobs and business thanks to the SAFE act, but that’s ok with City because all those businesses and jobs were related to legal firearms. The day City examines the utter failure of NY gun laws to stop Illegal gun crime, will be a first. I’d love to see the video of someone asking the 3 staffers who wrote this, to describe what is required to own a handgun in Monroe county.
He ‘bolstered’ food industries? LOL, yeah ask any landowner about the rising property taxes thanks to mandates from Albany via NYC. I’m not a paid reporter like Jeremy, Tim and Christine, but even I know that the $2 Billion school technology effort has 2 parts that would interest your readers. First the payments by the state for any iPads, etc, that upstate might receive from this debt will be over an EIGHT year period. Maybe City is still using some 8 year old computers, but most people don’t. Especially people who are training someone for the latest operating systems and programs. The other part of this new debt that might interest City is the fact that part, maybe a large part of the debt is to repair NYC schools. I keep hearing how well NYC is doing, how they really support upstate and then everyone at City along with the rest of us get to rebuild NYC schools that we will never see.
Some would read the Womens’s Equality Act as the countries most extreme late term abortion law, but that’s the way City always covers abortion. Never a mention of how to handle tragic medical emergencies as exceptions instead of what ever you want to call killing a healthy baby girl or boy. Bill Clinton emphasized the idea that we as a country ought to work harder to make abortion rare. I guess that’s not ‘militant’ enough for many.
When NY state spends millions and years to ‘study’ fracking and when we are next door to PA where thousands of fracked gas wells are producing gas, is it really too much to ask to expect City to be critical of this Gov for not releasing the NY fracking study? Oh right, the report might support fracking and the objective, looking for the truth, City can’t have that.
You really want to mention Sandy? Just because other NY outlets can’t be bothered to ask why billions of that aid aren’t accounted for, is no reason you guys shouldn’t wonder why that effort is still incomplete years after the event. I suppose politicians have to sort out their priorities before they act, but a lot of people suffered unnecessarily because of more talk than action before, during and after that storm. Cuomo ought to receive his share of blame for that instead of you touting him as ‘responding well to natural disasters.’
NY state is dead last in too many categories to continue to blow smoke for liberal theories, but it is fun to pretend the problem is the right instead of actually looking at things like, how effective was the ballistic fingerprinting law? What is the crime rate of police in this state vs NY permit holders? Come on, at some point even the most die hard, far left, liberal at your paper must have a moment where you think the propaganda is just not right. You advance this world by being truthful, NOT by pushing a lie or shouting a half truth. You are one of the last surviving print outlets, please do your job better.
You’re joking, right? Are you guys actually journalists? I mean, “professional journalists?”
I will vote in protest for Hawkins, Green Party. Let us not forget that Astorino or Cuomo cannot do anything without the full cooperation of the Assembly and the Senate together… If there is cooperation then all of us will benefit in the end.
When will the executive and legislative branches work together to make our great state prosper for all people ? When will our elected officials stop thinking in terms of Republican and Democrat ? What happened to a good solid set of ideas that work well for all of us ?
Craig R. Moffitt
City, you seriously can’t believe what you wrote. I won’t torment myself any further by documenting Cuomo’s horrific displays of how he has served NY. We all have witnessed it. You even mentioned a few of his “gaffes” in the beginning of your article. I would really like to know if journalists these days stand by anything. How do you get yourselves to believe what you write? Most people will be turned off by this pithy tongue lashing, but the elephant in the living room is getting bigger, and growing polka dots. It has to be said.
Deserves our vote? Possibly the worst example of distortion in print that I have ever read. Shameful.