The man who would be governor is visiting the Catskills whistle-stop style this week, with appearances in Catskill and Cobleskill on Saturday and in Monticello yesterday. Today, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is scheduled to appear at the New Paltz Community Center at 11:30am.
The photo above is Cuomo with his daughters in front of the the RV they're using on the upstate tour, which is dubbed "Drive for a New NY." Photo via Cuomo's Facebook page.
The RV is not exactly comfortable driving, Cuomo told the New York Times last week:
“It’s a little warm today. The air-conditioner’s on the fritz. It’s a little bit like a toaster oven on wheels,” he said.
Liz Benjamin at Capital Tonight has cobbled together Cuomo's schedule as it has been released to campaign volunteers. From the look of it, New Paltz is the last Catskills stop of the tour.
WGXC has audio of Cuomo's visit to the town of Catskill, and reports that Cuomo dodged a question about agricultural labor standards:
Afterwards, Cuomo took questions from the media, including one from WGXC’s Tom Roe who asked about Cuomo’s position on the Farmerworker’s Fair Labor Practices Act (S8127). Cuomo did not answer the question, but talked about the importance of farms to the New York economy.
The Daily Freeman caught another moment in Catskill, where the school superintendent buttonholed Cuomo:
“Tell me your plans for school reform, because we desperately need it,” Catskill school district Superintendent Kate Farrell said to the candidate. “Not only in education, but in funding.”
Cuomo responded by calling for consolidation of schools:
“Part of it is going to be the same reorganization that we’re going to have to do at the state agencies and the local governments and the healthcare institutions,” Cuomo said. “We’re also going to have to look at the educational system. We’re going have to look at consolidation of services in education because the cost is too high, the duplication is too high, and we’re not going to be able to afford the duplication by raising the property taxes. Otherwise, all these homes will be vacant at one point.”
In his speeches yesterday, according to the Times Herald-Record, Cuomo promised to trim the size of government:
He did speak of "right-sizing" a government with "over 1,000 state agencies" with "1,000 light switches" that must be turned on every day and "1,000 fleets of cars" that must be bought and fueled.
Record reporter Steve Israel noticed that Cuomo avoided taking sides on the controversial issue of gas drilling, and that he keeps the games "Hollywood Domino," "Blokus" and "Fact or Crap" in his campaign RV. But the best part of the Record article was Israel's first sentence, which began with an unfortunate choice of words:
The candidate with the huge bulge in the polls ...
UPDATED: We missed this great coverage of Cuomo's Monticello visit from the Catskill Chronicle.
