Regrets, Andrew Cuomo has a few — and he believes they’re not too few to mention.
Fresh off of announcing he’s running for mayor this year, Cuomo acknowledged Thursday that he wishes he would’ve done some things differently while serving as governor, including as it relates to police funding.
But Cuomo — who has emerged as the front-runner in June’s Democratic primary to replace the embattled Mayor Adams — had no qualms about other candidates in the race accusing him of trying to carpetbag the election by moving to New York City only a few months ago in order to mount a campaign.
“When you’re governor, you’re still a New Yorker. New York City is in New York State, and I was obviously very, very involved with New York City,” Cuomo, who lived at his brother-in-law’s ritzy Westchester County home before his recent registration in the city, said after a campaign rally in Manhattan when asked by the Daily News about the carpetbagging accusations.
“So I’m a New Yorker 100% through and through.”
When it came to his actual regrets, Cuomo, speaking during his first question-and-answer session with reporters since launching his mayoral campaign last weekend, said he should have as governor “added more police to the MTA if I knew New York City was going to be cutting police, which obviously I didn’t know.”
Cuomo was referencing how the city, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, shifted about $850 million in funding away from the NYPD in 2020 amid calls for defunding the department in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
A year before that city budget passed, Cuomo added 500 new officers to the MTA’s police force in 2019 that he at the time argued were needed to address fare-beating and homelessness in the subways.
The move nearly doubled the MTA police force and drew controversy at the time from some Democrats who argued the policy was counterintuitive. After Cuomo’s press conference, though, his spokesman Rich Azzopardi clarified Cuomo actually wishes he would’ve hired even more MTA cops in 2019 to hedge against the NYPD cuts a year later.
Police funding is a thorny topic for Cuomo. Though he said Thursday that calling for law enforcement cuts is “dumb,” Cuomo argued in 2020 that the defund-the-police movement was a “legitimate” issue, and as governor he threatened to withhold state funding from departments in New York that didn’t enact certain civil rights reforms.
Besides the police funding issue, Cuomo said he wishes he would’ve “done much more preparatory work in the years” preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed tens of thousands of New Yorkers in 2020 and 2021.
He cut himself some slack on the pandemic front, too, though, saying “no governor in the country” could’ve predicted COVID.
Cuomo didn’t mention regrets about a controversial policy he instituted at the outset of the pandemic barring nursing homes from refusing admission to guests diagnosed with COVID-19, a practice studies say resulted in many deaths. He also didn’t express regret about findings that he downplayed the number of such COVID-19 deaths in official tallies.
Yuki Iwamura/AP
In this Oct. 18, 2020 file photo, families of COVID-19 victims who passed away in New York nursing homes gather in front of the Cobble Hill Heath Center in Brooklyn to demand New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo apologize for his response to clusters in nursing homes during the pandemic. Images of Cuomo’s book were on display at the protest. (Yuki Iwamura/AP)
On a more philosophical level, Cuomo finally said he regrets as governor taking things “too seriously.”
“I wanted to do so much and was at times impatient with the process and the bureaucracy and everything is so slow,” said Cuomo, who resigned as governor in 2021 after being accused of sexual misconduct by 13 women.
Cuomo, who has denied any sexual wrongdoing, didn’t speak Thursday about those accusations. He has previously said he “deeply apologizes” to anyone he might have made feel uncomfortable.
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