The gloves are off!
Mayor de Blasio stopped sparring with Gov. Cuomo on Tuesday and delivered a ferocious uppercut — ripping him as a vindictive man who has crippled the city’s relationship with Albany’s legislators.
“What I found was he engaged in his own sense of strategies, his own political machi nations, and what we’ve often seen is if someone disagrees with him openly, some kind of revenge or vendetta follows,” de Blasio told NY1.
“I don’t believe the Assembly had a real working partner in the governor or the Senate in terms of getting things done for the people of this city and, in many cases, the people of this state.”
Setting off a potential civil war in the Democratic Party, de Blasio accused Cuomo of being more interested in “transactional” politics and “horse trading” than in doing what’s best for Gotham.
“I started a year and a half ago with a hope of a very strong partnership,” de Blasio told reporters at a City Hall news conference before heading off on a West Coast vacation. “I have been disappointed at every turn.”
De Blasio also took the governor to task for hiding behind unnamed sources in an attack on City Hall last week.
“And I want to hasten to say there was some interesting back-and-forth last week, and some unnamed sources well-placed in the Cuomo administration had a few things to say,” de Blasio told NY1.
“I’m here in front of you on record saying what I believe.”
De Blasio later said he fully expects his remarks to draw Cuomo’s wrath.
“I’m not going to be surprised if these statements lead to some attempts at revenge,” the mayor told reporters.
The two camps have clashed on several major issues. Just last month, Cuomo accused the ultra-progressive mayor of trying to engineer a “giveaway to developers” with a proposal to extend the 421-a tax-abatement program to increase affordable housing.
De Blasio said the Republican-led state Senate has blocked his agenda with Cuomo’s blessing.
“And what I believe here is the governor worked with the Senate in some cases to inhibit the work of the Assembly, to inhibit the agenda that New York City put forward,” the mayor said.
De Blasio also slammed Cuomo for working behind the scenes to limit the renewal of mayoral control of public schools to only one year.
“In the case of mayoral control, he did not act with New York City’s interests at heart, and certainly not the interests of our schoolchildren and their families,” the mayor said.
“They [Republicans] did not have an ideological difference with us on mayoral control . . . I think that was the governor’s architecture.”
Cuomo’s camp gave an icy response to de Blasio’s barbs.
“For those new to the process, it takes coalition building and compromise to get things done in government,” said Melissa DeRosa, a Cuomo spokeswoman. “We wish the mayor well on his vacation.”
De Blasio insisted that he will not back down from the Albany challenges.
“This whole experience reenergizes my belief that you can’t accept business as usual in Albany that we have to do something to structurally change it,”,de Blasio said. “And we will be back next year with additional ideas about what the people of this city need and we’re going to fight for them.”