After a decade as New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo left an extremely mixed legacy; the state would be far better off if it could ditch much of it.
Yet the only major activity we see on this front is a petition that calls on the Legislature to pull Gov. Mario Cuomo’s name off the Tappan Zee Bridge.
On the one hand, Andrew basically rammed the honor for his dad through the Legislature in the dead of night; nobody calls it that, and the road signs mostly just confuse folks; a similar petition back in 2017 garnered over 100,000 signatures.
On the other hand, the new bridge wouldn’t have been built without Andrew making it happen (other govs had just talked about it, for at least a decade), and it’s a fine-looking engineering marvel, a huge improvement over the structure Gov. Tom Dewey had thrown up in the 1950s — at one of the river’s widest stretches, crazily enough, because he didn’t want to cooperate with New Jersey to build it any further south.
Also: Mario was a gov many New Yorkers are happy to honor.
Indeed, The Post was likely his harshest critic his entire three terms in office, but the gov still stepped up to lead the negotiations that saved this paper from death and/or dishonor back in 1993, after the bankruptcy of then-owner Peter Kalikow left us (temporarily, thank God) in the clutches of various nefarious characters.
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Much more important: State leaders should be undoing Andrew’s actively awful legacy, such as nearly all the legislation he signed in 2019, from the no-bail law to the economically suicidal Climate Act to the deadly Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act to the bills that laid the groundwork for congestion-pricing.
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Undo all his expansions of tax subsidies for Hollywood; get all his picks off the state Parole Board.
To be fair, it looks like Gov. Kathy Hochul is trying to walk back at least part of the Climate Act’s green insanity — if only to save her own hide by avoiding public fury over the soaring costs it’s starting to impose.
Tragically, most of his legacy looks likely to last because it’s less obviously awful, but really it’s a shame Mario gets all the grief.