Andrew Cuomo's Long, Sordid Corporate Subsidy History
He pledged to double down on failure if elected New York City mayor.
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Most mayoral elections in the United States receive scant attention, but the New York City version is usually different, with pundits and pols of all stripes looking to America’s most populous city as a bellwether of potential political trends to come. That’s even more so the case this year, with Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani campaigning against disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (who is running as an independent), and Republican gadfly Curtis Sliwa.
Mamdani is symbolically carrying the hopes of the left finding a successful playbook in the Trump era, while Cuomo is the choice of the establishment, business world trying to hold off an upstart challenger. As usual, I am not here to prognosticate on any particular candidate’s electoral chances, and I don’t think a New York City election can actually predict much about the rest of the country. Should he win, I think Mamdani’s tactics will be more emulated than his policy platform.
All that said, it caught my eye last week that Cuomo said at a mayoral forum — when asked what he would do about Wall Street banks and financial firms reportedly moving jobs out of state — that he would “beg” and offer them “whatever” they need to come back, before touting his record on corporate subsidies as governor.
You have to change the attitude 180 degrees and you have to start to attract them back. You have to say, first of all, ‘I get it, and I want to partner with you. Come back, I’ll offer you incentives, we’ll do start-up capital, let me help you find a space, let me help you find land.’ I did that as governor, I was chief marketing officer. I went around the world and said to corporations ‘come back with me, we’ll find whatever you need.’ But it’s a total shift in attitude.
The above does accurately describes what Cuomo did before he was forced to resign as New York governor. This shtick, in fact, was core to his identity. He even joked about changing his name to “Amazon Cuomo” should that corporate behemoth bring its vaunted “HQ2” to New York.
However, his rosy remembrance is at odds with the facts: Cuomo’s strategy of showering corporate executives with favors monetary and regulatory led to an explosion of corruption, with few economic benefits to show for it. That he seems to want to recreate that experience in New York City is reason enough to oppose his candidacy.
New York is one of the most profligate states in the nation when it comes to corporate subsidy spending, putting some $10 billion annually into various payouts to individual corporations between state programs and locally-run handouts administered by Industrial Development Agencies, or IDAs. During Cuomo’s tenure, 13 individual deals crossed the $100 million mark, and another 15 exceeded $50 million.
As I detailed in this report with several allies a few years ago, many of Cuomo’s deals backfired so spectacularly that the details would be hilarious if they weren’t tragic. For example:
A $950 million deal for a subsidiary of Tesla that a state audit found recouped 54 cents on the dollar for the state.
A $270 million deal with the manufacturer Plug Power that totaled out to $4 million per job created.
The Central New York Film Hub, a movie studio outside Syracuse, cost $15 million in public funds to build, was sold for just $1, and never hosted a major movie shoot, after Cuomo boasted, “Who would have ever figured: Hollywood comes to Onondaga, right?”
A $90 million deal to build a factory for the Soraa LED lighting company, “which walked away from the deal with no penalty, and which spent none of its own money on the project.”
We even left out an $85 million deal with Corning that cost taxpayers $340,000 per job created.
And there’s no evidence any of these deals provided an economic boost to New York’s economy. An audit of many of New York’s largest corporate subsidy programs that was released in December 2023 confirmed what years of independent research on the subject had already found: These programs provide scant return on investment, create few jobs, and generally underdeliver compared to the lofty promises of politicians.
There’s plenty of evidence, meanwhile, that New York’s addiction to corporate handouts is draining its school districts of billions of dollars in much-needed funds.
But this isn’t just about the economic effects: Corporate subsidies breed corruption, necessitating a too-cozy relationship between elected officials and the specific corporate leaders with whom they’re cutting deals. And Cuomo’s antics revealed that in spades.
For example, he oversaw “the Buffalo Billion,” a pot of economic development funds that was supposed to revitalize upstate New York, but instead provided almost no benefits and led to administration insiders and developers being convicted of corruption charges for steering money to particular favored companies and individuals. (Those convictions were later overturned by the Supreme Court on procedural grounds, and a retrial is still in process.) Many of Cuomo’s deals also enriched the real estate developers that power his campaigns, more than making them back what they spent in campaign donations.
Mamdani, meanwhile, included as a campaign pledge that he would prevent city officials from signing non-disclosure agreements as part of economic development deals, and would support state-level legislation to ban the use of NDAs in those deals entirely. That’s very much a different tune than the one Cuomo is singing, though remains to be seen how serious Mamdani is about sticking to that particular promise.
Either way, New Yorkers should be concerned that Cuomo learned nothing from the steaming heap of failure and corruption that he oversaw, and is committed to bringing the same sort of dealings he implemented in Albany to New York City.
SIMPLY STATED: Here are links to a few stories that caught my eye this week.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill that will prevent monopoly utilities from charging ratepayers for the utilities’ political spending.
New York State Assemblymember Anna Kelles has proposed applying an excise tax to crypto-mining operations.
How dollar store workers are organizing outside of the traditional union structure.
An Illinois bill creating transparency requirements and a clawback mechanism for public sports stadium subsidies was introduced amid debate over a new stadium for the Chicago Bears.
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— Pat Garofalo