The New York governor said he asked the president for help with some long-stalled infrastructure projects.
Cuomo met with Trump in Washington.
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Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo met with President Trump at the White House on Wednesday morning, where the two discussed major infrastructure projects that Mr. Cuomo views as crucial to restarting the region’s economy, the governor said.
“It was about, how do we supercharge the reopening, especially in New York, which has been hardest hit,” Mr. Cuomo said at his daily news briefing.
Among the projects on the agenda was the plan to build new rail tunnels under the Hudson River, a project known as Gateway; the expansion of the Second Avenue Subway; and an AirTrain to La Guardia Airport, Mr. Cuomo said.
The governor has said the projects will be key factors in boosting New York’s economy as it recovers from the pandemic.
“We have major infrastructure projects in New York that are ready to go, that are desperately needed, that were desperately needed 30 years ago,” Mr. Cuomo said on Wednesday. “Build them now. Supercharge the reopening, grow the economy.”
All the projects discussed required some level of federal funding or approval, Mr. Cuomo said. The governor urged Mr. Trump to help “get the bureaucracy to move faster” so work could begin.
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transcript
transcript
‘It Was a Good Conversation,’ Cuomo Says of Meeting With Trump
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York detailed his meeting with President Trump, which included a discussion of potential infrastructure projects in the state.
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There are political differences between myself and the president. He’ll say it. I will say it. I don’t even need to say it. We can go do a Google search and you can find 400 nasty tweets about political differences between myself and the president. I said to the president when this started, “Forget all that.” At the meeting we just had, it was the same way. It was not about politics. It was not about any of that. It was about what — how do we supercharge the reopening, especially in New York, which has been hardest hit? How do we take some of these big infrastructure projects that have been sitting around for a long time — which if we were all smarter and better, we would have done 30 years ago — and actually get them up and running because we have to do this work anyway? And because we need the jobs, now, more than ever. And it was a good conversation. The president’s from New York. So he has a context for all the things we’re talking about. I think the president also acknowledges and realizes that New York — we’re very aggressive about getting these projects done and getting them done on time. This is not the typical government project. We actually get these things done. We’re building the first new airport — at La Guardia — in 25 years in this country. We built the largest infrastructure project in the United States, which was a bridge that went across the Hudson River, now named the Mario Cuomo Bridge. It was the largest infrastructure project in the United States. We got it done on time, on budget. So if he gives us the green light, this is not going to be years of discussion. I have a shovel in the trunk of my car. We’ll start this afternoon.
Mr. Trump, a Republican, and Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, have had a bumpy public relationship throughout the pandemic, with the two exchanging praise for each other’s virus response efforts one week and trading criticism the next.
They met last month at the White House and had what Mr. Cuomo called “a very good conversation.”
The two men, Queens natives who have known each other for decades, have also sparred over the proposed rail tunnels, which would replace deteriorating 110-year-old tunnels that used to carry more than 100,000 commuters every weekday.
Despite personal appeals from Mr. Cuomo, the president pulled federal funding for the plan in 2018.
On Wednesday, the governor said that the two had again put politics aside to focus on the needs of New Yorkers. “It was a good conversation,” he said, sounding a familiar note.
Mr. Cuomo indicated that he was ready to start work on the Hudson River tunnel project at a moment’s notice.
“I have a shovel in the trunk of my car,” he said.
Mr. Cuomo also reported 74 additional deaths in the state from the virus, about the same as the day before.
Megabus will resume some service in N.Y.C. next week.
The budget bus service Megabus announced on Wednesday that it would resume service in and out of New York City next week, ending a two-month suspension because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Beginning on June 1, the company will provide what a spokesman called “a limited schedule” of rides between New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, even as New York City remains on a state-mandated “pause” that has kept nonessential businesses closed and many people inside their homes.
The spokesman, Sean Hughes, said the company had suspended service in the region on March 26; starting next week, it will offer two round trips per day. By comparison, he said, Megabus ran more than 20 round trips during the same period in 2019.
In a statement, Mr. Hughes said the safety of passengers and employees was a “top priority.” Passengers will be required to wear face coverings while boarding, exiting and moving around the bus, and will also be encouraged to do so while seated, according to the company’s website.
The company’s website also lists other health and safety measures it has taken, such as reducing the number of available seats on double-deck buses, providing hand sanitizer for employees and putting disinfectant wipes in its vehicles.
New Jersey is ramping up testing and contact tracing.
New Jersey is largely meeting its goal of testing up to 20,000 people a day for the coronavirus, Gov. Philip D. Murphy said.
More than 118,000 people have been screened since May 22, with 5 to 7 percent of them testing positive for the virus, Mr. Murphy said at his daily news briefing on Wednesday.
“We want more New Jerseyans to get tested,” he said. “We especially want you to get tested if you have symptoms of Covid-19.”
The state’s health commissioner, Judith Persichilli, said 900 contact tracers were working to determine who has had close interactions with a sick person. The goal, she said, was to have 20 to 30 contact tracers per 100,000 residents.
New Jersey also reported 148 new virus-related deaths on Wednesday, nearly triple the number on Tuesday. (The state’s daily death tolls can fluctuate because they often include deaths from weeks ago that were only recently confirmed.)
A giant mural will honor health care workers and virus victims.
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Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada is an artist whose work fits more easily on a parking lot than inside a museum.
In 2008, Mr. Rodríguez-Gerada honored then Senator Barack Obama with a mural spanning nearly 2.5 acres of beachfront in Spain. The size was needed, he said at the time, “to reflect on why the world needs heroes.”
Six years later, Mr. Rodríguez-Gerada went bigger. On six acres of the Mall in Washington, he constructed a composite image of “an attractive young man,” who an art and architecture critic at The Washington Post said “gives the uncanny impression of looking straight at you.”
Now, the landscape artist is looking to show his appreciation of the health care workers who have died from the coronavirus: He is creating a piece on a lot at the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.
There, a 20,000-square-foot mural will show a doctor with a face mask and head covering. The eyes are based on those of Dr. Ydelfonso Decoo, who practiced medicine in Upper Manhattan for decades and died in March from the virus.
On Facebook, Mr. Rodríguez-Gerada said he chose Dr. Decoo as a model to honor him and to bring attention to the impact the virus has had on neighborhoods with large numbers of black, Latino or poor residents. Those areas have the highest death rates from Covid-19, according to both city and state data.
The mural, which was being completed on Wednesday, was commissioned by SOMOS Community Care, a health network that works mostly with immigrants and Latinos.
Groups that helped organize the piece included Make the Road, a progressive advocacy organization, and El Museo del Barrio, which focuses on Puerto Rican and Latin American culture in the United States.
Henry R. Munoz, a founder of SOMOS, said his admiration of Mr. Rodríguez-Gerada’s work crystallized into plans for the mural about three weeks ago. The project, he said, was “an attempt to put a face on the pandemic.”
In giving plasma, she found a slice of the old New York.
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Eliza Shapiro, an education reporter for The New York Times, got the coronavirus around the time New York City was shutting down. What followed, she said, was “three weeks of misery.”
But that experience culminated in a gift: Ms. Shapiro produced high enough levels of Covid-19 antibodies to donate plasma, allowing her to feel useful during a time when it is hard not to feel powerless.
In an article describing her experience with plasma donation, she writes:
Trying to fit eight plasma donations, scheduled at least a week apart, into three months reminded me of a favorite Before Times activity: making restaurant reservations in a city where dining out can feel like a competitive sport.
The Blood Center is typically booked solid from 7:45 a.m. through the evening, and I rarely find a free appointment even when I call in the morning to ask about cancellations.
That competition has been productive: The Blood Center is collecting about 4,000 units of plasma a week. Most of the country’s plasma supply is coming from donors in New York.
When I started my own visits to the center at the peak of the city’s crisis, I soon discovered that it’s one of the last places in town that still feels like the New York City I have lived in all my life.
Long Island begins the reopening process.
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The densely populated suburbs of Long Island took steps toward restarting their economy on Wednesday, leaving New York City the only area in the state to remain on what Governor Cuomo has labeled a “pause.”
“I know people are itching to get back to work,” Laura Curran, the Nassau County executive, said on Tuesday.
In the past two weeks, nine regions in New York have entered the first phase of reopening by meeting seven benchmarks set by the state.
People in the reopened areas can pick up retail purchases in stores or at curbside and can commence work in manufacturing and construction.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has said he hoped New York City could begin reopening in the first half of June.
The city has yet to meet two benchmarks, on available hospital beds and contact tracers, though Mr. de Blasio said on Wednesday that the city would have more than 1,700 contact tracers working by June 1.
At his daily news briefing on Tuesday, Mr. Cuomo said the state would direct more resources to some low-income city neighborhoods hit hardest by the virus. They include the ZIP codes covering Norwood in the Bronx and Far Rockaway and Corona in Queens, each of which has had more than 80 people newly hospitalized for the virus in the past week.
State lawmakers reconvene to vote on pandemic relief.
New York State lawmakers are expected to vote remotely on more than two dozen coronavirus-related bills this week, almost two months after they passed a bare-bones state budget and retreated from Albany because of the pandemic.
Legislators are considering a bevy of proposals to provide relief to homeowners and renters, including a $100 million program to subsidize the rent of many tenants who have seen a significant drop in their income.
The Legislature, which is meeting over video on Wednesday and Thursday, is also expected to pass legislation to provide benefits to the families of front-line workers who died of the coronavirus, a measure Mr. Cuomo said he supported on Monday.
Lawmakers are also discussing a plan to allow New York City to borrow up to $7 billion to cover operating expenses; the city has seen a precipitous decline in tax revenue.
Mr. de Blasio has said he views such borrowing as a last resort. Mr. Cuomo said on Tuesday that authorizing the city to do it would be “fiscally questionable.”
“Fiscal responsibility is very important here,” he said. “We don’t want to create a situation where the state or any local government borrows so much money that they can’t repay it, and then you have to start to cut service and now you’re in that vicious downward spiral.”
For weeks, Mr. Cuomo and Mr. de Blasio have been calling on the federal government to provide billions of dollars in direct aid to bridge state and local budget gaps, warning that without it they would have to make steep cuts to services.
Voters are unimpressed with Cuomo’s oversight of nursing homes.
Governor Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes during the coronavirus crisis appears to be damaging his standing among New York voters.
In a Siena College poll released Wednesday morning, a plurality of registered voters (48 percent) said he did only a “fair” or “poor” job addressing the needs of nursing homes. Just 44 percent of voters rated his nursing home management “good” or “excellent.”
Covid-19 has killed more than 6,000 residents in nursing home and adult care facilities, including deaths presumed to be linked to the virus. On May 10, Mr. Cuomo reversed the administration’s policy.
The governor has blamed nursing homes for failing to raise their concerns, and the Trump administration for inadequate guidance. A spokesman for the governor declined to comment Wednesday on the poll numbers.
Mr. Cuomo’s overall favorability ratings also fell this month, from a high of 77 in April to 66. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percent.
“Cuomo’s stratospheric ratings from New Yorkers in April have fallen from their record highs but remain very strong as two-thirds of voters still view him favorably, nearly two-thirds give him a positive job performance rating and more than three-quarters still approve of the job he’s doing to address the pandemic,” said Steven Greenberg, a Siena College pollster.
Pollsters interviewed 796 registered voters in New York State between May 17 and May 21. They found that 37 percent of voters — and nearly half of downstate voters — know someone who was killed by Covid-19.
Tell us about the moments that have brought you hope, strength, humor and relief.
The coronavirus outbreak has brought much of life in New York to a halt and there is no clear end in sight. But there are also moments that offer a sliver of strength, hope, humor or some other type of relief: a joke from a stranger on line at the supermarket; a favor from a friend down the block; a great meal ordered from a restaurant we want to survive; trivia night via Zoom with the bar down the street.
We’d like to hear about your moments, the ones that are helping you through these dark times. A reporter or editor may contact you. Your information will not be published without your consent.
Reporting was contributed by Maria Cramer, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Michael Gold, Andy Newman, Derek M. Norman, Azi Paybarah, Dana Rubinstein, Eliza Shapiro and Matt Stevens.
