Don’t be surprised if the budget fight leads to grow ing conflict between Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Cuomo.
Bloomberg, while generally supportive of the tough fiscal medicine offered this week in Cuomo’s first budget, still complained that it imposed disproportionate cuts on the city: “Unfortunately, the budget does not treat New York City equitably.”
But tension will arise from a host of issues: Institutional friction has long been built into the relationship between New York’s mayor and governor.
The city is a creation of the state and in many ways heavily dependent upon it, as Cuomo’s budget shows.
Yet the Office of the Mayor of New York in many ways commands more attention than the governor. Mayors have ready access to the state’s largest media market, as well as the national media, in ways that an Albany-based governor doesn’t. And the state is disproportionately reliant on the city’s economy for its growth and revenues, which gives the mayor some leverage.
The classic example of mayor/governor friction was the relationship in the ’60s and ’70s between John Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller — men with outsized egos and national ambitions.
Things started off amicably: Rockefeller heavily subsidized Lindsay’s first mayoral campaign. But Rocky came to regret his investment and felt that Lindsay did not show him the proper respect.
For his part, Lindsay couldn’t stand Rockefeller. “He thinks he knows what’s best for everyone,” the mayor complained.
Their personal conflict came into the open when Lindsay took a hard stance in labor talks during the city’s 1968 sanitation strike. Rockefeller took control of negotiations and cut his own deal with the union to end the strike. The governor had openly undercut the mayor.
In the early ’70s, the state and city went through a yearly budget dance, with Lindsay demanding more state aid and warning of impending doom if his demands went unmet. Meanwhile, Rockefeller blamed Lindsay for “declining city services due to inept and extravagant administration of city government.”
This culminated in the 1973 report of the Scott Commission, which Rockefeller created to investigate the operations of city government. A Lindsay aide called it an “empty and vindictive political attack on the mayor and the city.” While certainly motivated by Rockefeller’s anger at the man he had helped get elected as mayor eight years earlier, the report was also a damning critique of the Lindsay administration.
In the end, both men share some measure of blame for the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis. Lindsay lost control of spending, especially as the city’s economy imploded after 1969. And Rockefeller was a master at using all kinds of bonds to fund the expansion of government — the kind of magical bookkeeping that got the city in trouble.
The political guerrilla warfare between Rockefeller and Lindsay did little to help the city or state during difficult times. In the end, it also harmed their political ambitions.
It is no secret that Bloomberg is thinking about national politics, making the politics of the state budget tricky for him. Nationally, voters are concerned about excessive government debt and spending. If Bloomberg chooses to run for president, he’d have to prove his fiscal bona fides. Yet as mayor, he needs to defend the city’s prerogatives and get as much money from Albany as he can.
Relations between Bloomberg and Cuomo are unlikely to deteriorate to the Lindsay-Rockefeller level. Yet some kind of conflict seems unavoidable in these times of fiscal austerity.
Vincent J. Cannato is the author of “The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and his Struggle to Save New York” and is working on a history of the 1975 New York City fiscal crisis.