Syracuse, NY — Three years after being mayor of Syracuse, Stephanie Minor suddenly got a statewide follower after demolishing New York’s powerful governor and fellow Democrat Andrew Cuomo.
Miner’s public criticism of Cuomo raised her profile so much that it was adopted in 2018 to oppose him, eight years after the mayor ended. She lost.
And she disappeared from politics.
In a new memoir that hit the bookstore on Tuesday, Minor explains why she dropped out of public after bidding for the governor. She was exhausted from years of fighting with Cuomo and other power brokers.
“My belly was free of fire,” she wrote.
In Mayor of Madame, published by Kansas University Press, Miner talks about becoming an idealistic 39-year-old who has decided to lift his fortunes in his hometown.
“It’s a warning story for people who challenge politics,” Minor said in an interview this week.
Over time, the 54-year-old Minor regained her faith in what she could achieve through her elected office. Positive changes don’t come easily, she said, and it requires personal sacrifice. But that is achievable.
“You don’t always win, and you don’t always lose,” Minor said. “But the important thing is to fight for what you believe in.
Many of the challenges Minor describes in “Madam Mayor” are familiar to Syracuse readers. The allegations that state leaders stimulate her drums to help municipalities pay for repairs to water systems and other infrastructure. Her job is to form a land bank and vacant real estate registry to deal with neglected real estate. Her efforts to restore effective surveillance to the police station and improve the image in the community.
However, Minor’s book offers new details and insights into her inauguration and the aftermath.
Thinking room
Minor wrote a game-changing opinion article for the New York Times in 2013, criticising Cuomo for introducing a policy called “Pension Smoothing.” This article created a crack of hostility between Cuomo and the miners, which continued throughout her tenure.
Despite the interests, Miner did not consult staff about the editorial until the very end.
Miner worked with the editors of The Times for two weeks to hone Op-Ed. She accused Cuomo of not dealing with the city’s financial illness, but cooked “witnesses” to cover pension costs through borrowing, a tactic that only makes them deeper into their debt.
“I didn’t share with staff what I was writing about editors. I wanted to give them some room to think about decisions,” she wrote.
Finally, to pull it back half an hour before the deadline, Miner showed an editorial to two staff members who were still at the city hall desk at 7:30pm
“I asked them to stop, gave them a copy of the editor and told them they would be published the next day to the New York Times unless they called to stop it in the next 30 minutes,” Minor wrote.
Minor was not the only critic. State Secretary Thomas DiNapolis said he had “serious concerns” about Cuomo’s plan, but DiNapolis later supported the revised version. Moody’s Pension is Moody’s Pension Investor Service, known as “long-term risk stops” for pension plans and local government funds.
Cuomo remained at Loggerheads with Minor from that point on, piloting state investments in towns outside Syracuse and requests for minor infrastructure funding. The governor encouraged Syracuse officials to pursue economic development so that they could “fix their own pipes.”
“The worst personal loss”
In 2015, the city of Syracuse filed a lawsuit against Cor Development Co. The mining administration chose to purchase and develop approximately 30 acres of waterfront property in the inner harbor.
Minor claimed in the lawsuit that COR officials sought and obtained a favorable tax credit from Onondaga County after city officials pledged to develop an internal port without them.
Minor writes that she felt betrayed by Kol, whom she calls “friends of my family,” and her president, Steve Aiello. Minor’s husband Jack Mannion (who passed away in 2019) also had personal connections with Cor.
“Aiero was close to Jack and his sons,” Minor wrote. Jack’s second son, Terry Mannion, served as an outside lawyer for many of the COR development’s legal transactions, while Jack’s youngest child, Kelly Mannion, was a real estate broker run under the name COR Real Estate. ”
Miner writes that she personally captured the cleft at Koh above the inner harbor.
“The whole sailor transaction was the worst personal loss of my political career,” Minor wrote. I worked very hard, but only did it by the people closest to me. ”
At the time, Aiero denied that he had promised not to seek tax credits. He said Minor lied about him making a promise. The city’s lawsuit was dismissed due to lack of evidence.
“Bully Kiss”
It was the first time miners have become Cuomo’s presence after the New York Times Op-Ed announced at a press conference a few months later its new economic development program, a New York startup.
Minor, she wrote, learned more about the program when she arrived at the event. And she didn’t approve. Cuomo had planned to allow all taxes for businesses near the state university’s campus for 10 years, including city taxes.
Minor was led to the receiving line after the announcement. Cuomo leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. It was a “bully kiss,” she wrote.
“It was about power that he kissed me,” Minor wrote. “I’ve never considered it sexual. We were gladiators in the public ring, and that’s how he showed him to be the boss. ”
Cuomo resigned as governor in 2021 after being accused of sexual harassment by 11 women. He consistently denied the allegations, saying they were politically motivated. He is currently running for mayor of New York City.
“From the first day, the governor claimed he had never harassed anyone,” Cuomo spokesman Rich Azopaldi told The New York Times earlier this month. “A few years later, facts have confirmed that. New Yorkers are not naive, they know exactly what the ugly political situation is.”
“We need you.”
Six weeks before the mayor ended, in November 2017, the miners attended a symposium in Washington, D.C. during their break and were guided to meet House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Capitol.
Miner had already rejected pleading from Democrats who wanted her to run for Congress. Pelosi tried again.
“Stefannie, everyone says you’re the person in this seat,” Minor quotes Pelosi as saying. “We need you.”
Minor wrote the meeting “unattractive but untempted,” she wrote. She chose not to run.
“A shocking turn of events”
Minor ran for governor in 2018 and represented the newly formed party called The Serve America Movement, or Sam. According to her book, she was initially recruited to be run by New York City property developer and philanthropist Joe Rose, who is politically active.
Rose and a political consultant convinced miners that her candidacy would help raise important issues and establish a new party to challenge the hegemonic Democrats. Rose has pledged to help Minor raise $1 million for the campaign, she writes. In the end, her campaign coincided with Sam, with Rose not involved.
Four months before the election, Rose left the campaign. He never helped raise money, Miner writes. She still doesn’t know why.
“It was a shocking event,” Minor wrote. “He recruited me, made a commitment, talked to me almost every day, and then he just disappeared.”
Roses challenge the views of miners. He reached by phone on Tuesday and said he opposed the Minor’s decision to run under the sum banner, among other campaign strategies he felt inappropriate. He said it was Sam’s operatives who had not promised to raise $1 million.
Rose said he told Minor unless he agreed to the tactics of the campaign.
“She made the decision and I was out,” Rose said.
State election records show Minor will spend just $800,000 on her campaign. This is for Cuomo, which spent more than $30 million on primary and general elections.
She finished fifth in the race with just under 1% of the vote. However, the Minor had 55,441 votes, which was enough to win the Sam Party’s vote line.
Cuomo and state legislators later increased the minimum votes on the voting line to 130,000. Sam Party merged with the Forward Party and the Renewal American Movement in 2022.
There are no more campaigns
Minor is currently teaching two courses on politics and government at Colgate University. She also provides legal representation to family court children, usually representing 5-10 children at any time.
Minor has coached the new mayor through the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative.
She has no plans to seek another elected position, she said in an interview.
As mayor, she said, “There were incredible sacrifices I made in terms of time and relationships.” “I enjoy being with my family and creating my own schedule.”
Minor will discuss her book at an event with TV anchor Michael Benny on Saturday at 6pm Parthenon Book, 333 S. Salina Street
Staff writer Tim Knauss can be contacted at tknauss@syracuse.com or (315) 470-3023.
