Andrew Cuomo has scooped up endorsements from some of the most powerful unions in town—from the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council to the service workers' union 32BJ SEIU.
But on Tuesday night, DC 37, the city's largest municipal union that represents 150,000 municipal workers, announced that they were leaving Cuomo off their endorsement list. Instead, they are backing City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams as their top choice for mayor, followed by Queens Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani and Brooklyn State Senator Zellnor Myrie.
DC 37 hasn't said why they left Cuomo off their endorsement slate. Maybe it's because Cuomo didn't bother to show up for the union's candidate forum in February. Or possibly, they were turned off when Cuomo's campaign asked if libraries had considered funding their operations by charging patrons for services.
That idea was floated by a Cuomo campaign representative in a private meeting with the heads of unions for workers at the New York, Brooklyn, and Queens library systems, all of which fall under the umbrella of DC 37, according to union members.
John Hyslop, president of Queens Library Guild, Local 1321, said Cuomo's suggestion came as part of the typical endorsement process: Campaigns float proposals to the union, and the union and its members respond with constructive feedback about how workable it is.
The librarians were vehemently opposed to this idea from the Cuomo campaign, Hyslop said, and the union conveyed that feedback on the proposal to the Cuomo campaign.
"The library local presidents met with the campaigns for the mayoral candidates to let them know what our members want—and that is, baseline, consistent budgets for libraries, more money to hire more people because we don't have enough people to staff six day service, and more money to pay our library workers because we have a huge attrition and retention problem," Hyslop told Hell Gate.
Word of the question did not sit well with some rank-and-file librarians. "It’s an iconic encapsulation of how detached [Cuomo] is from reality and how far he is from understanding what a library is, what a New Yorker is, what a New Yorker wants," said one New York Public Library Guild member who learned of the question from their local leadership, and who requested anonymity to freely discuss union and library business.
Asked about the exchange, Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi initially denied that any meeting between the campaign and library union local heads took place. "Nobody I talked to—this isn't a large campaign—said that they talked to these people at all," Azzopardi told Hell Gate.
A subsequent communication from Jason Elan, another Cuomo spokesperson, called the accounts of the conversation "a misrepresentation of the governor's position," and attributed that specific suggestion to "a campaign volunteer who sat in on the call and was asking for clarification of the union's position and prefaced the question saying 'I am not a spokesperson for the campaign and this is not a policy proposal.'"
Elan added, "To be even more clear, the governor has never and does not now believe libraries should charge for services."
We asked the Cuomo campaign who the "campaign volunteer" was, why this volunteer was sitting in on a meeting with union leaders, and whether the Cuomo campaign had a transcript of the meeting to share. The Cuomo campaign has not yet responded to these questions.
Elan's clarification of Cuomo's stance notwithstanding, the question of charging for library services appears to have been the most salient moment of the meeting for some library union leaders.
In an email to union members last week, Deborah Allman, the president of the New York Public Library Guild Local 1930, which represents library workers at NYPL, summarized the unions' meetings with a few campaigns, and their takeaways.
"Andrew Cuomo's campaign asked if the libraries had considered charging patrons for services in order to raise revenue," Allman wrote.
Hyslop, the Queens Library local head, stressed to Hell Gate that critical feedback was not limited solely to Cuomo—union members also pushed back against Mamdani's plan to place "Mental Health Navigators" in library branches, as a responsibility that libraries, who are still fighting against Adams-era budget cuts, were not ready to take on.
Whoever is elected mayor will have lots of say over the future of the library system, at a time when federal funding for the libraries might dry up. DC 37 told Hell Gate that the Cuomo campaign's question about fees for services did not come up in the union's screening and endorsement process.
“A library is fundamentally a public institution that serves the public," said the anonymous guild member. "Our mission is inextricably tied to an indiscriminate provision of services to anyone who seeks it. It’s offensive but also comical that Cuomo’s team would just not understand that.”