ALBANY, New York — When former Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner wanted money for water pipe upgrades, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo had a much different priority in mind for the upstate city: a $300 million stadium.
Miner contends in her new memoir it’s that kind of political calculation that harmed New York cities during the Cuomo tenure — flashy projects and deals with campaign donors taking precedence over providing essential services.
The stadium deal she recounted ultimately fell apart, and Syracuse did get money for its pipes — but the funding came two years after Miner had left office, in what she described as a petty, parting shot from Cuomo.
Miner had one of the most visible feuds with Cuomo during his tenure as governor. After he appointed her co-chair of the state Democratic Committee in 2012, they quickly split after she accused him of failing to act aggressively on rising pension costs. By 2018, she was mounting a third-party run against him.
While Miner’s book is focused on the policy challenges facing cities, Cuomo is a constant presence as she recounts her time leading Syracuse. He repeatedly emerges as a figure primarily interested in increasing his own power — whether through delaying infrastructure work or, on two occasions, kissing the former mayor against her will. Her portrayal of the scandal-scarred governor runs counter to the one Cuomo is now trying to project as he runs for New York City mayor — one of a problem-solver uniquely equipped to deal with the nitty-gritty of government.
“Cuomo’s philosophy seemed to be that successful governing was about winning,” Miner writes. His team “wouldn’t get attention for bringing resources to old systems the public took for granted. Their unquenchable thirst for positive headlines overtook any desire to do the grinding and boring work that is actual governing.”
The ex-governor’s team brushed off Miner’s takes.
“I haven’t heard or thought of that name in years,” said Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi. “And my tastes tend to not be science fiction or fantasy, so I probably won’t read that one.”
Miner offers an in-depth accounting of Syracuse’s efforts to secure state funding for road and water projects. As she tells it, the governor had little interest in this work and argued the state already subsidized its cities enough. Instead, cities like hers should attract employers so they could fund their infrastructure without relying on Albany.
Cuomo, though, did take an interest in spending on Syracuse when it included a ribbon for him to cut.
The governor spent $16 million building a film hub; the state eventually unloaded that for $1 when it turned out Hollywood wasn’t interested in relocating to Central New York. He spent $50 million renovating the area’s fairgrounds. And he had plans to spend $300 million of public money to fund a replacement of Syracuse University’s Carrier Dome.
Miner says she was kept uninformed of that idea until word leaked just before Cuomo planned to announce it: Other local officials “wanted to curry favor with the governor by ordering everyone to keep me in the dark,” Miner wrote. “It was common knowledge that anything done to slight me was looked upon favorably by the governor.”
Miner tried to rally support against the project, and she was initially backed by the incoming university president. But the president soon flipped: “He explained he was new to New York state politics and had been convinced he could not cross the governor. Thus, he would support the new stadium.”
Yet the stadium deal — which Cuomo hoped to announce as he was running for reelection in 2014 — eventually collapsed. A lobbyist and developer who were tasked with winning support “were called to a meeting where the governor screamed at them … [one] said he had never seen anyone as angry as the governor,” Miner writes.
While Cuomo seemed uninterested in Syracuse’s infrastructure, the city did win $10 million in 2015 to replace roads and pipes, thanks to a discretionary pool controlled by the Assembly.
“A few months later, as we were putting together a plan for how to spend the $10 million, I got a call from a high-level staffer from Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s office,” Miner writes. “He said Governor Cuomo told Silver the money would never be released to Syracuse while I was mayor.”
The money eventually went out the door two years after she left office.
When Syracuse won a state grant in Cuomo’s first term to fix city schools, Miner got a call from Judy Rapfogel, Silver’s top aide — a few years before Silver was convicted in part due to using his state post to collect legal referral fees for a firm handling asbestos lawsuits.
“She said Shelly asked her to call to see if the schools had asbestos issues,” Miner writes.
The school district then needed state legislation to move ahead with a second phase of renovations. This was at a time when Miner, still co-chair of the state Democrats, was openly feuding with Cuomo over his pension plans.
“Rapfogel called to tell me she and Shelly believed the governor refused to sign the school reconstruction legislation until I had agreed to resign” from the party post, Miner writes. She left that job a few weeks later.
Miner described only a handful of in-person meetings with Cuomo after the two began feuding. These were always tense, including one congressional campaign rally when the governor, “apropos of nothing,” brought up Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano when encountering Miner backstage.
Cuomo “began threatening Spano. He said he knew Spano’s family, and when he got a hold of him, he was going to make Spano cry,” Miner wrote. “There was absolutely no context for this adolescent outburst. It was one of the strangest interactions I’ve had in my life.”
She was perplexed when describing this encounter to the late Assemblymember Richard Brodsky: “Are you an idiot?” Brodsky said. “He wasn’t threatening Spano. He was threatening you.”
In her book, Miner also recounted two incidents in which Cuomo publicly kissed her at the end of well-attended events.
“I assumed he did it because he knew I was popular, and he wanted to show people we had a relationship as he prepared for his reelection,” she said, recalling an encounter after one of his 2017 State of the State addresses. “Did I want that? No. Was it clear from my body language, my facial expression, and everything he knew about me I did not want that? Yes, which is why he did it: to show his political dominance …
“With Andrew Cuomo, his kissing me was about power. I never viewed it as sexual. We were gladiators in a public ring and that’s how he showed he was boss … I chose to be in the arena, and his kisses were the least of his control tactics.”
Miner said in an interview that the book shows how “the actual impact of him trying to solve problems in a substantive manner is really lacking. You can look at that in terms of how many people left the state when he was governor, you can look at that in terms of his economic development policies that were mired in corruption and were abject failures.”
She noted that the memoir wasn’t driven by Cuomo’s new attempt to be a mayor himself, though: “The book was scheduled to be published in March for a year now,” said Miner, now a professor at Colgate University and a consultant for Bloomberg Philanthropies.
In a nod to the scandal around Cuomo’s own memoir, Miner noted that she was paid less than $5.1 million to write the memoir and did not use any state resources in the endeavor.
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