Gov. Cuomo could beat Rob Astorino in a landslide tomorrow and still lose — to Mayor de Blasio.
If de Blasio helps Democrats retake the state Senate, he’ll crown himself New York’s most important elected official. He’ll use his power to affect policy, sure — but more important will be the money and fealty that come to him rather than to the governor.
The mayor’s been working as the one-man committee for a Democratic Senate. In quease-inducing fashion, he’s hit up the city’s big businessmen, taxi moguls and real-estate folk for big donations.
De Blasio has passed that money to upstate races, where the extra cash could help a Democrat replace a Republican. He’s also lent two top staffers to the effort.
Why should anyone in the city care? Because Albany controls a lot of what city politicians can do — and keeps us (sometimes) from being even more loony-lefty.
A few examples:
Rent regulation: For 43 years, the state has been in charge of Gotham’s rent-control system. Advocates for rent-regulated tenants have long wanted Albany to hand back control to the mayor.
To prevent that, the real-estate industry perennially pours money into keeping Republicans and independents in the Senate. It fears a rent freeze, and for good reason. Campaigning for mayor, de Blasio supported a freeze — and now he wants the authority to do it.
Taxes: Remember de Blasio’s other campaign pledge, to raise the income tax on the city’s 1 percent to pay for pre-K expansion? He didn’t get his tax hike, because Albany, not City Hall, controls the income-tax rate.
Yes, Cuomo gave the city a half-billion a year instead. But de Blasio has other money problems.
His biggest looming crisis is that his payments for teachers’ back pay won’t really kick in for another year — when he’ll need another half-billion bucks to start paying those retroactive raises.
Minimum wage: Albany sets the state’s and city’s minimum wage — $8. The mayor would like local control so that he could set a higher “living wage.” How high? In September, de Blasio said businesses that receive city subsidies must pay workers $13.13 unless they offer health benefits.
Schools: Mayor Mike Bloomberg won control over city schools, but mayoral control expires next year. And a law signed by Cuomo this year forces the city to pay charter schools’ rent — a rebuke to the mayor, who wanted to yank space from three charter schools he doesn’t like.
So there’s plenty of room for policy shock should de Blasio help upstate Dems get elected. Rich people could see higher income taxes, landlords could see a rent stall and small businesses could struggle with higher payrolls.
But de Blasio’s real motive is power for its own sake. If landlords know that he controls the rents, they’ll have to give money to him, not to (or at least in addition to) faraway state senators.
It’s not just money — it’s discretion. Even if the mayor doesn’t freeze rents, he can use the threat as a stick — as Mayor John Lindsay did in the late ’60s, the last time the city controlled rents.
Right now, the mayor is using zoning to encourage developers of new buildings to set some apartments aside for poorer people. But what if he could cajole owners of older buildings to “volunteer” to put some “affordable” units aside, lest they see their rents on market-rate apartments frozen?
Similarly, lots of businesses big and small can’t or won’t pay all their employees $13.13 an hour. So they’ll find ways to get exceptions, or to delay legislation — by donating lots of money to the mayor and to councilmembers.
(The nice idealistic people who genuinely want a “living” wage and a rent freeze should recall that the mayor took gobs of money last year from people who wanted to get rid of the horse carriages — yet the horses are still there.)
John Catsimatidis, the supermarket owner who lost his own mayoral bid last year, was honest about why he gave de Blasio $50,000 for the state Senate effort: “I do a lot of business in the city.”
In other words, it’s risky to say “no” when the mayor calls.
So let’s remember that neither the mayor nor the governor is advocating for even nominally smaller government — the governor, after all, has extended a state-level income-tax hike. They’re just jockeying over who reaps the spoils of our big government.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.