“The Governor Is On the Line…” Andrew Cuomo and the Real Estate Industry
By Jotham Sederstrom May 8, 2012 7:00 am
reprintsWhen Mr. Cuomo first took office in 2011, for instance, he quickly sided himself with the Committee to Save New York, a pro-business lobbying group that he brandished as a handy counterpunch should the health care and education unions—two of the state’s biggest spending areas—decide to pounce on his reformist agenda. In the end, he slashed billions from the budget without nary a negative advertising campaign, which those unions had used as weapons to crush Mr. Paterson’s attempt at spending cuts.
Then there was the formation of 10 Regional Economic Development Councils, which created an effective and fair forum for counties—“Mohawk Valley,” “Capital Region,” etc.—to compete openly for public funding. The method broke away from the tradition in Albany in which backroom dealings, not merit, kickstarted a project.
“The councils brought everyone to the table,” said Kathryn Wilde, president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit business interest group. “In New York City, we made the priority the Hunts Point food market, and that plan has been connected to the Hudson River Valley and upstate agricultural industry as a way for the market to support those regions,” she added.
“It’s the reverse of the pork barrel approach.”
The governor has also helped resolve other funding issues, like the MTA’s deficit-ridden capital program.
In March, he reached an agreement with legislative leaders to bankroll the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s capital budget plan, committing $13.1 billion to help the city agency complete projects like the Second Avenue subway and the Fulton Street Transit Center.
The state had originally pledged $9.1 billion for the first two years of the project.
He has brought the fate of the Tappan Zee Bridge to the fore, a project too gargantuan for many of his predecessors to effectively push forward, insisting that a new bridge (at an estimated cost of $5.2 billion) be built. The federal Department of Transportation nixed a $2 billion loan request for the project last week, but Mr. Cuomo remains undaunted. Besides, the Tappan Zee project stands for more than just linking the Westchester and Rockland counties.
As he put it, it’s “going to be about making the statement that government can work, and society can work and we can still do big things.”
“The thing that makes Andrew very effective is he’s very operational,” said a former colleague of Mr. Cuomo’s. “He makes a list of what needs to get done to achieve a goal and he assiduously makes sure everything on his list is done in order to achieve that goal.”
One big goal on that list is the Javits Convention Center. During his State of the State speech at the start of the year, the governor made the relocation of the Javits Center to Queens his marquee economic development project in the city, a plan at once brilliant and fraught with challenges.
Under the proposal, Javits would be moved to the Aqueduct Race Track in Ozone Park to create a 3.8-million-square-foot convention center, the largest in the country. Proponents say the new development would allow the city to finally capture the biggest trade shows and events that the current facility is too small to host. Though he has spelled out few details, Mr. Cuomo’s idea has the potential to connect to a huge casino gaming hub that would be built at Aqueduct, probably by its operator, the international gaming consortium Genting.
Attractive in all this is the fact that the state would have to expend little if any capital to effect the plan; Genting would foot the bill.
