october12–25, 2020 | newyork 43
the midst of a pandemic than most of the
European countries. And even beyond
that, in New York, the planning has
seemed quite chaotic and stop and go
over the past few months, especially in
the city.^14 Why?
Well, first of all, you’d have to ask Mayor
Bill de Blasio the question.
What’s your critique of how he has han-
dled it?
The factual analysis—not to get into
editorial comment—you have 700 school
districts in the state. We have left it to
each individual school district to come up
with a plan subject to state guidance. All
700 school districts did that, and they
have a variety of plans. What happened in
New York City is they put forward a plan
and then failed to complete it, so they had
to delay the opening. They cameup with
a second plan and failed to complete it
and had to delay the opening. That’s
where people get the impression of
disorganization.
Could you have done anything to pre-
vent that from happening? Could you
have intervened, claiming that authority
at the state level?
No. The state would have had to declare
an emergency and take over the City
Department of Education. Education is a
locally run function, subject to overall state
regulation by the State Department of
Education, which I don’t control—I don’t
even control it on the state side.
There’s 700 school districts in this state,
and there’s politics in this state. You have
very Republican districts upstate. Any one
of them is capable of saying, “Oh no, no.
The parents in my district want to stay
open.” That happens, my credibility and my
effectiveness go right down the drain. It
just has to happen once.
But you have required employees of
nursing homes to be tested.You’ve
required students at state colleges to be
tested. Theoretically, you could put reg-
ulations in place that would govern at
least some aspects of the opening of
schools, right?
Well, we have. We have state guidance.
We say, “There has to be distancing. There
has to be masks. There has to be a testing
regimen.” But then the localities design the
exact plan to do that with their parents and
with their teachers.
So if you were in Bill de Blasio’s shoes,
how would you have handled things dif-
ferently in the city?
Well, I think anyone would say what’s
important is public confidence, the dem-
onstration of capacity. So come up with a
plan that is accepted and you can execute.
It’s never good when you come up with a
plan and you say school is going to start on
Monday, and everybody plans their life
that way, and then you change, and then
you change again. That’s been the problem
in New York City.
And we haven’t gotten to stage two—
what actually happens when you bring stu-
dents back. Does the infection spread? We
don’t know that yet because New York City
hasn’t done any testing in the schools of the
teachers and the students that they pub-
lished. And that’s the real question, right?
Does the virus increase? That we don’t
know. That we’ll know next weekand the
week after.
Well, you said earlier that you suspect,
of course, that there will be some amount
of transmission. It’s just a matter of how
much. Right?
Right.
Let’s talk a little more, big picture,
about where this leaves the stateand the
city in kind of a long-term way. The short-
term impact has been enormous—as you
mention in the book, we’ve already paid
out 16 years of unemployment benefits in
four months. But you’re also planning for
a major budget shortfall. You put auster-
ity measures in the budget that you
approved earlier in the spring, partly as a
way of dealing with that. We’veseen in
Michigan that some tax revenue has been
higher than anticipated. But what do you
expect for New York? What kind of a hole
do you expect New York State will be in?
Well, we were talking about tides. New
York is going to be especially susceptible to
the national tide. And this is a national
problem. This economic issue, like the pan-
demic from day one, was a national prob-
lem. And if we don’t receive federal assis-
tance, it’s going to be a negative,at least
midterm negative, for our economy. If we
ever had to close this deficit on our own, it
would require higher taxes, cutting of
expenses, and borrowing.
It’s a $50 billion deficit.^15 It’s the highest
in the history of the state. The question is
normally: Do you raise taxes, or cut
expenses, or do you borrow? Here there is
no “or”; it would be “and.” You’d have to cut
expenses and tax and borrow. And you
would hurt the economy. And you would
hurt the city, more so.
New York City, you have an additional
challenge, which is similar but much
worse than the challenge after 9/11. After
9/11, there was a period where people
were questioning New York Cityin gen-
eral and the safety of the city. Nobody
wanted to go downtown. People were
afraid to come back into the city. We have
that, plus, right? There’s a sense that New
York City and the density and the crowd-
ing is a problem for covid. That’s com-
pounded by a sense of rising crime, rising
homelessness, lack of capacity. So those
issues are all interrelated. There’s no
doubt that it’s going to take significant,
united, aggressive action to get New York
City back to where it needs to be.
How much federal support do you think
will be necessary?
Well, the hole is $50 billion. Anything
short of that is going to require usto make
it up on our own. The biggest deficit the
state has ever solved on its own has been
about $10 billion, and that required real
hardship. I’m asking [the federalgovern-
ment] for the 50 because my point is it’s
their liability. They caused it. They missed
the virus coming from Europe, not New
Yorkers. It was their negligence that caused
this. Why would we be liable?
But I have handled a lot of disasters and
emergencies and reconstruction. When
I was at hud, I worked on dozens of hurri-
canes, floods, etc. We had Superstorm
Sandy here, even our 9/11 experience in
New York. There’s an opportunity in this.
When you rebuild, you don’t build back
what was there before. You build it back bet-
ter. You sustain damage on your home; all
right, you put in an insurance claim, and a
tree fell and hit the roof and you have to fix
it. But bytheway, inthemeantime,youhave
a new roof.Andthey havetoredothewin-
dows, andyou
Trump announced he had
COVID-19 after a positive
test conducted on October 1.
On October 3, his doctor said
that the president was 72
hours into his diagnosis,
raisi her
Tru
posi sed.
Thest ate-budgetdeficitis
$14.5billionthisfiscal
yearandwillriseto$3 0
billionin2021.Cuomo’s
requestforfederalaid
includesadditionalfunds
fortheMTAandlocal
governments.
When de Blasio first announced that city
schools would be closed for the remainder
of the year, Cuomo responded that that was
just the mayor’s “opinion” and that no policy
decision had been made. A few days after our
interview, Cuomo again intervened in the
mayor’s plans, ordering that in certain COVID
hot spots in the city schools close one day
earlier than de Blasio had planned.
13. 14. 15.
PHOTOGRAPH: PBS NEWSHOUR/YOUTUBE (Continued on page 104)
