Governor and mayor must unite on migrants to say: Enough!
The sun comes up, the tides roll in — and New York mayors and governors hate each other. It’s nature’s way.
So all that’s surprising about the nasty letter Kathy Hochul just sent to Eric Adams is that it was so long in coming.
Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay were at each other’s throats within hours of the latter’s inauguration. There was a transit strike, you see.
Hugh Carey and Ed Koch, former congressional colleagues, sparred continually — if relatively civilly — in the wake of Gotham’s narrowly escaped bankruptcy.
George Pataki and Rudy Giuliani had epic dust-ups — largely conducted by their respective press officers — as the city struggled back from a crime-driven near-collapse.
Yet somehow these reluctant but inevitable partners managed to make it all work, and New York prospered for it.
Sadly, entropy is also eternal. To paraphrase the Norma Desmond character in “Sunset Boulevard” — the issues are still big; it’s the politicians who got small.
That is, Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio couldn’t pull it off. Can Hochul and Adams?
They seem close to collapse — overwhelmed by the issues, the continuing migrant crisis being just the most pressing.
Certainly, Hochul and Adams have been at sea on migration since well before the first buses arrived from Texas.
Now it’s no longer possible to ignore the crisis — so in her letter to the mayor, the governor naturally deflects blame, accusing the city of not doing enough to help itself.
It’s not exactly a “drop dead” statement, but close enough.
And, as it comes right after the feds torpedoed her request to use Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field to shelter migrants, there’s doubtless a full ration of pique involved.
The thing is, though, this time Hochul is more right than wrong.
She has a lot to answer for — will that migrant tent at the old Creedmoor Psychiatric Center really cost $350 million? — but Adams fell flat first.
Let’s be clear: Yes, City Hall is shoveling out billions — but that’s no solution, it’s a big part of the problem.
Here’s the rest of it:
Forty-one years ago, New York City conjured from thin air a universal “right to shelter” — anybody, from anywhere, who can make it to Gotham gets a roof, for free, just for the asking.
Also, free food, health care and schooling for the kids.
It took the world a while to catch on. But now it has, so here comes the world — and because the world has more people than New York has money, space or the ability to cope, the first thing that needs to go is the “right to shelter.”
(Really. How can the city make a credible case for federal help when the entirely reasonable response will be: “Well, you asked for it?”)
Adams and Hochul somehow must exceed expectations here — get on the same policy page; weather fierce progressive resistance to necessary reform and get the spending under control — and that’s just to start.
But other governors and other mayors have made it work — never mind the fireworks along the way — because in the end it was New York that mattered most.
Whether Kathy Hochul and Eric Adams can measure up is the question of the hour.
And it shouldn’t be long before New York finds out.
