Governor Mario Cuomo Quotes

Although Cuomo could not get much support in the legislature for changing the MTA’s structure, Ravitch decided to resign anyway. He was frustrated and exhausted after four years of intense pressure in a position that did not pay him anything. He gave Cuomo only an hour’s notice before an August press conference announcing his resignation. The MTA chair did not want to give Cuomo an opportunity to say that he had pushed Ravitch out.78 In his autobiography, published in 2014, Ravitch wrote that both Carey and Koch had staffed their administrations with the highest-quality people they could find and did not try to micromanage them or begrudge them credit. Control, he said, “was not uppermost in their minds.” Ravitch then took a dig at New York State’s fifty-second and fifty-sixth governors (Mario Cuomo and his son, Andrew), saying, “This was not and is not the Cuomo style.

They’ve literally tried to secede from New York City and form their own city or join New Jersey. In June 1989, the New York State legislature gave Staten Island residents the right to decide on secession, and in November 1993, 65 percent of voters voted yes. Governor Mario Cuomo insisted that the referendum be approved by the state legislature, where it was defeated,