NEW YORK — One of Andrew Cuomo’s testiest exchanges with a campaign rival offered a revealing look into how the former governor ran the nation’s largest transit system.
During the final debate in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, Brad Lander claimed that, as governor, Cuomo had “screwed” and “cheated” immigrant workers who washed subways during the pandemic. In batting down the allegation, Cuomo reminded New Yorkers that sometimes he acknowledges he’s a micromanager — and sometimes he doesn’t.
“They should never have hired illegal immigrants — if it is true,” Cuomo said of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “But obviously I had nothing to do with them hiring anyone.”
Lander balked at Cuomo’s use of the term “illegal immigrants” and fired back, saying the orders for the cleaning service “came from on high.”
“Oh, I see,” Cuomo said. “So every contract that the MTA contracts, you want me to be held responsible? Come on.”
The idea for the cleaning was something Cuomo announced in late April 2020, prompting an unprecedented overnight closure of the subway system. And for anyone familiar with his reputation as a micromanager, it’s not a stretch to think Cuomo could actually be responsible for the contract.
After all, as governor, Cuomo involved himself in rethinking how to repair the tunnel that carries the L train, picking the color of subway tiles and pressing the MTA to spend a quarter billion dollars to decorate a bridge with colorful, pulsating lights.
At other times, though, Cuomo has claimed the MTA wasn’t his thing.
“I have representation on the board,” the then-governor said in 2017, downplaying his role. “The city of New York has representation on the board, so does Nassau, Suffolk, Dutchess, Putnam, Rockland, other counties, OK?”
His rivals aren’t buying it. According to them, the former governor’s rollercoaster leadership of the MTA informs how he would helm the country’s biggest city. Lander, Zohran Mamdani and the alliance of progressives seeking to block Cuomo from winning the Democratic primary have tried to capitalize on every perceived weakness, from his treatment of women who accused him of sexual harassment to the nursing home Covid-19 deaths during his tenure. Cuomo has denied wrongdoing. Some of his MTA controversies — especially his redirecting of transit funds to struggling state-run ski resorts and his mixed messaging about who runs the agency — have been part of the battery of campaign attacks against him.
“The first thing that New Yorkers deserve out of a leader is an acknowledgment of their own responsibilities,” Mamdani, the state assemblymember eating into Cuomo’s lead, told POLITICO on Saturday. “There were years where he tried to tell New Yorkers that the MTA was actually under the auspices of Bill de Blasio, and what we need is someone who owns up to the scale of the crisis at hand.”
Cuomo campaign spokesperson Rich Azzopardi responded by ticking off the former governor’s list of accomplishments.
“Governor Cuomo increased MTA operating funding by $2 billion a year, passed the largest capital plan in history, increasing it 125 percent to $54.8 billion, and he proudly finished the Second Avenue Subway and Moynihan Train Station — two projects generations of politicians talked about but didn’t have the slightest clue how to actually build,” Azzopardi said.
He pointed to the L train tunnel project and the East Side Access project, which connected the Long Island Rail Road to a newly opened Grand Central Madison terminal.
“The advocates and the far left didn’t support that nor did they support hiring 500 MTA police to combat subway crime — history has borne out both those decisions,” Azzopardi added.
That isn’t nearly all there is to Cuomo’s track record when it comes to the MTA, though.
To understand Cuomo’s role with the MTA, it’s important to know who’s actually in charge. The agency’s board has a complex balance of power, with the New York City mayor, suburban county executives and state Senate having some say over its voting members. The governor, though, controls the nominating process, has more board representatives than anyone in the state and picks its chair and CEO.
Early in his administration, Cuomo was so notorious for keeping his distance from the agency's problems that John Raskin, the former head of the Riders Alliance, made it his mission to get straphangers to understand the power Albany had over their commutes. In the summer of 2015, the group took a cardboard cutout of Cuomo on a tour of the subway system to make its case.
That hands-off approach made Cuomo’s exchange with Lander all the more galling to the transit advocacy group.
“He’s still running away from the major responsibility he had to New York City as governor,” said current Riders Alliance spokesperson Danny Pearlstein.
At City Hall, Cuomo would have far less power over the MTA than he did as governor, but as governor, in one of many clashes with Mayor de Blasio, he called it the "city subway system."
“As governor, he defunded and badly weakened the subway system and caused the summer of hell,” Lander said Saturday as he campaigned outside an Upper West Side subway station.
The so-called summer of hell was an infamous series of transit problems in 2017 that began with Amtrak’s Penn Station but also included MTA infrastructure breakdowns that left its customers suffering from the worst on-time performance of any major rapid transit system in the world.
As that hell was beginning, Cuomo said his responsibility for the MTA merely consisted of appointing a few people to its board.
But during his tenure, he also exerted control. In 2016, he was publicly reported to be “hands on” and fretting about details like circuits that were complicating work on the Second Avenue subway. In early 2019, he was hailed for avoiding a shutdown of the L subway line. By the time a new subway boss, Andy Byford, arrived at the agency in 2018, Cuomo was “sinking his hands deeper every day,” according to the late New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer, a legendary observer of the subway system. By spring 2019, another local news outlet had enough fodder to compile a list of Cuomo’s “greatest MTA micro-managing hits.”
Out on the campaign trail, Cuomo has pointed to an unsafe subway system as one of the reasons he’s running. In the speech launching his bid, he talked about an era when “government worked and the subways were safe. But today people stand with their backs against the walls, away from the tracks and away from each other, wary, on guard, afraid they might be the next victim, afraid of New York at its worst.”
Cuomo has run his campaign for mayor on a platform of experience and competence, including his three terms as governor, as New York attorney general and as U.S. secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
“The mayor of the city of New York — we have to understand that that is basically a management job,” the former governor told a Brooklyn megachurch Sunday.
His opponents contend that’s the point and have mocked him for precisely that when it comes to the MTA.
Mamdani submitted bids for equipment once purchased to fulfill Cuomo’s dreams of a choreographed, colored light show on the MTA’s bridges, and he criticized the multimillion-dollar check Cuomo’s administration once had the MTA cut to bail out upstate ski resorts.
Homelessness in the subway, by Cuomo’s own account, worsened during his and de Blasio’s tenures: In 2019 — more than eight years after he took office — Cuomo said the homeless problem in the train system was “worse than ever.”
The pandemic accelerated that.
Because of lost ridership during the pandemic, the MTA was facing the worst financial crisis in its history when Cuomo resigned in August 2021 following the sexual harassment allegations. There was turmoil at the top, too, after Cuomo’s repeated spats with MTA leaders, including Byford, who resigned amid feuds with Cuomo.
Before stepping down in 2021, Cuomo attempted to change how the agency was run by proposing a leadership structure that would give him even more say, echoing a move his father had tried four decades earlier.
None of this appears to be forgotten under Gov. Kathy Hochul. During her time in office, there have been occasional indirect shots at how things once were under her predecessor.
MTA CEO Janno Lieber recently thanked Hochul and state lawmakers for signing off on a budget deal that helps fund a $68 billion multi-year capital plan, the largest in the agency’s history, but one focused primarily on repair work. Lieber said the deal acknowledges that the MTA needs money for repairs and isn’t “some weird bailout” to invest in essential infrastructure.
“We’re not waving around a ton of shiny baubles,” he said. “We love new projects — no secret they have helped to transform and grow the system — but we must maintain, we must preserve this system.”
After leaving office, Cuomo changed his position on at least one important MTA-related policy: the congestion pricing tolls he signed into law to fund subway upgrades. Last year, as he was pondering his political future, he and his former aides criticized Hochul’s handling of congestion pricing — first for embracing it, then for temporarily tanking it. With the midterm elections looming and Republicans critical of the policy, Cuomo questioned in March 2024 whether “now is the right time to enact” the tolls; that June a top adviser criticized Hochul for pausing the program before it went into effect.
For his transit critics, Cuomo did everything wrong, except for congestion pricing; while Hochul did everything right for the MTA, except for the five-month period where she paused congestion pricing. Now, Hochul is one of the program’s biggest champions, in part because it’s shown she can stand up to President Donald Trump, who has opposed the toll.
Hochul has shown a willingness to take ownership of issues plaguing the MTA. She pushed plans to redevelop Penn Station, struck a funding deal with New Jersey on new train tunnels under the Hudson River, advanced plans for a new transit line between Brooklyn and Queens and agreed to fund increased police patrols in the subway system amid a major crime spike. Within months of winning a full term, she had filled the MTA’s budget gap. And she hasn’t burned through MTA leaders, instead having remarkable stability after years of tumult. Even when congestion pricing went off the rails, she and Lieber stood together.
If Cuomo wins the primary and goes on to be elected mayor, advocates who did battle with him over his MTA management are bracing for the worst and hoping for the best.
“The hope is that Cuomo grew a lot as a person and manager and can actually delegate because, if he can’t, then the city is going to be dysfunctional in a different way than it was under Eric Adams,” said John Kaehny, executive director of the government accountability group Reinvent Albany. “But if the MTA is your only basis of comparison, then it bodes very poorly for the city.”
Jeff Coltin contributed to this report.
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