Cuomo aide pushes back against Trump’s Upstate comments
CAPITAL REGION, N.Y. >> The Cuomo administration pushed back Friday on disparaging comments by President Donald Trump, saying the president is just wrong about the economy of Upstate New York and suggesting that people who would heed his advice and leave the region in search of better jobs in other states “might have to turn left and keep traveling south across his border wall into Mexico.”
Gov. Andrew Cuomo Senior Advisor John Maggiore was responding to comments Trump made at the White House on Wednesday when he told reporters that upstate residents have “been treated very badly,” and said “if New York isn’t gonna treat them better, I would recommend they go to another state where they can get a job.”
“I woke up yesterday morning and was reading my online papers and my blood was boiling and steam was shooting out of my ears,” said Maggiore. “The president was describing a region that I don’t know.”
“It’s the first time I’ve ever heard a president of the United States tell an entire region to pack up and move,” said Maggiore. “It’s not reflective of what we’re seeing and it’s not reflected by the actual statistics.
Maggiore said unemployment and job creation statistics paint a very different picture than what the president suggested in his remarks.
Unemployment rates in the Capital Region, which includes Saratoga and Rensselaer counties, which stood at 7.4 percent when Cuomo took office in 2010 have dropped to 3.4 percent as of 2017 and more than 54,000 private sector jobs have been created since 2010.
Despite the president’s claims, he said, the population increases in New York have exceeded population increases in most other states outside the Sunbelt states.
Saratoga and Rensselaer have seen an overall increase in population since 2010 and a 12 percent increase in millennials moving into the region. In Rensselaer, he said, there has been a 15.7 percent increase in millennials since 2017, an increase in young people moving into the region that is “better than Brooklyn.”
Beyond the statistics, Mag- giore said, all one has to do is walk down the streets of any community to see the new life being breathed back into those communities.
“It’s hard to quantify this, but they seem to be becoming hipper places,” he said of cities like Troy.
Speaking of Troy, Maggiore said that 25 years ago, the city was filled with boarded-up and abandoned buildings. Today, he said, many of those buildings, which, he said, boast “phenomenal architecture” are being repurposed and Troy has become a “very walkable community,” with shopping, restaurants, a busy waterfront and a bustling nightlife.
“This is where young people are moving and the businesses are following,” he said.
Maggiore conceded that much of the region still faces challenges, but said the reality of the Upstate economy “is very, very different than what the president is implying.”
“It has nothing to do with reality,” he said.
Wednesday was not the first time that Trump has disparaged upstate New York.
He made similar comments in 2017, when he said in the Wall Street Journal that residents in “upper” New York should leave their houses and move to places like Wisconsin for jobs at a Foxconn plant had been that he boasted would bring at least 10,000 new jobs to the state. According to reports, the company has actually created only 178 jobs to date and has been forced to forego millions of dollars in tax incentives.