As Andrew M. Cuomo runs for mayor of New York City, his prevailing argument to voters has focused on his experience in government, including his nearly 11 years as governor.
Mr. Cuomo has highlighted the infrastructure projects he championed as governor, like LaGuardia Airport and the Second Avenue subway, and his role in raising the minimum wage and approving gay marriage.
But his tenure, which ended in 2021 after he resigned following a series of sexual harassment allegations that he denies, also included decisions that critics say hurt the city.
They contend that Mr. Cuomo was vindictive toward the city as part of his bitter feud with Mayor Bill de Blasio, and that he should have done more to protect the city, especially its lower-income residents, from budget cuts and the pandemic.
Here is how Mr. Cuomo handled five key issues.
A Beleaguered Transit System
When subway delays began to soar in 2017, Mr. Cuomo remained mostly silent even though he was responsible for the system through his control of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Under his watch, subway delays steadily rose from about 28,000 per month in 2012, shortly after Mr. Cuomo took office, to more than 70,000 per month in 2017.
The subway was starved of state funding under Mr. Cuomo and former Gov. George E. Pataki. New Yorkers were particularly outraged in 2016 when the Cuomo administration forced the M.T.A. to redirect $5 million in transit funds to three state-run ski resorts that were struggling.
Mr. Cuomo eventually declared a state of emergency for the subway and released a plan to fix it. He hired Andy Byford to run New York City Transit, and Mr. Byford seemed to work wonders.
But as the subway got better, tensions grew between Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Byford, who left after two years, complaining that the governor had made the job “intolerable.”
“Byford was the best thing that happened to the system in my lifetime,” said John Samuelsen, the head of the Transport Workers Union of America. “He’s the best service delivery professional that I’ve ever dealt with, and Cuomo chased him out of town.”
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said that the former governor had overseen the largest capital investment in M.T.A. history and had intervened to halt a full closing of the L train between Manhattan and Brooklyn in 2019. Mr. Cuomo had privately expressed frustration that Mr. Byford did not embrace technology or understand the politics of being responsible for the system.
Even Mr. Cuomo’s critics give him credit for eventually supporting congestion pricing, a plan to toll drivers entering Manhattan to pay for subway upgrades. He got the plan approved in 2019 after resisting it for years and after many failed attempts by others, including a push by former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in 2008.
It was a significant achievement that could unlock billions of dollars for the subway. But as Mr. Cuomo began to eye a run for mayor last year, he suggested that congestion pricing be shelved. Now that it is showing signs of success, he says he supports it once again.
A Rise in Homelessness
New York City has a record number of homeless people, and many families have left the city because it is so expensive.
Roughly 57,000 New Yorkers are currently living in homeless shelters who are not part of the recent influx of immigrants, compared with about 38,000 in 2011.
The homeless figures rose steadily while Mr. Cuomo was governor. Plenty of factors contributed to the problem, but many experts point to the end of a rental assistance program called Advantage as a turning point.
The city ended the program in 2011 after Mr. Cuomo withdrew state funding. More than 21,000 families had participated, receiving rental vouchers worth up to about $1,000 a month.
Within three years of the program’s demise, the shelter population had grown by about 16,000 people.
Mr. Cuomo’s critics, including Mayor Eric Adams, have also blamed him for making the mental health system worse by overseeing a reduction in psychiatric beds as governor. From 2011 to 2021, the number of beds in state psychiatric hospitals in New York City fell by 28 percent, from 1,451 to 1,045.
Mr. de Blasio said in a recent interview that he had pushed to build 300,000 units of affordable housing and tried to work with Mr. Cuomo to build more: “We never got meaningful support from the state.”
Mary Brosnahan, who was president of the Coalition for the Homeless when Mr. Cuomo was governor, said that it was difficult to watch him on the campaign trail arguing that he would fix homelessness as mayor.
“People assume that the guy knows housing policy and that he was effective at reducing homelessness when in fact it increased dramatically under his watch,” she said. “Why should we believe him now when he says he’ll bring it down?”
Mr. Azzopardi said that it had been Mr. de Blasio’s responsibility to address homelessness as mayor and that Mr. Cuomo had made investments in supportive and affordable housing. He said that the cuts to Advantage had been in response to a $10 billion state budget deficit that Mr. Cuomo had inherited in his first year as governor.
He said that the loss of psychiatric beds had been offset by new beds in community-based residential settings for people with mental illness.
A Focus on Infrastructure
One of Mr. Cuomo’s central campaign messages is that he is a builder.
As governor, he oversaw major infrastructure projects that had stalled under previous leaders: the opening of the Second Avenue subway on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the reconstruction of LaGuardia Airport in Queens, the opening of the Moynihan Train Hall in Manhattan and a new Kosciuszko Bridge between Brooklyn and Queens.
Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat from the Bronx who endorsed Mr. Cuomo, tied him to the abundance movement that is popular among some Democrats searching for a message for the party.
“One of the most powerful intellectual trends of our time is the abundance movement, which emphasizes the need for a government that can build,” Mr. Torres said. “Governor Cuomo is one of the few genuinely great builders of the 21st century.”
The Second Avenue subway took more than a century to open, and Mr. Cuomo played a hands-on role. He pressured transit leaders to finish the project by the New Year’s Eve deadline in 2016, and would make unannounced stops at stations to yell at workers about escalator issues.
Mr. Cuomo’s record appeals to New Yorkers who lament how nothing big ever gets done in the city. Mr. Bloomberg, who endorsed Mr. Cuomo, completed major projects, such as extending the No. 7 subway line into the Far West Side of Manhattan and building the High Line. Mr. de Blasio was not known as a builder; he proposed a Brooklyn-Queens streetcar that never happened.
But Mr. Cuomo’s hard-charging style could lead to problems. Transit officials failed to complete final safety testing before the Second Avenue line opened. For months, it operated under a temporary certificate, and expensive crews were posted in stations at all hours to watch for fires.
The subway line was also one of the most expensive in the world at $2.5 billion per mile.
Critics have pointed to other flaws. Moynihan Train Hall is a stunning gateway with high-end amenities, but it largely serves Amtrak riders. It also does not have benches like other busy stations, and the project did not add tracks to accommodate more trains.
Navigating the Pandemic
Many voters say they appreciated Mr. Cuomo’s daily news briefings during the coronavirus pandemic and felt comforted by him during a traumatizing period.
But some insist that Mr. Cuomo’s record on the pandemic should be a political liability, if not criminal.
His handling of nursing home deaths and his use of state workers to help him with a $5 million book deal early during the crisis were investigated. Some elected officials have also raised concerns about his policies on testing and vaccinations, arguing that they did not prioritize Black and brown communities.
The tense relationship between Mr. Cuomo and Mr. de Blasio led to chaos, including a public spat over whether to enact a “shelter in place” order in March 2020. Mr. de Blasio called for the measure on March 17; Mr. Cuomo dismissed the idea and said it was too drastic.
On March 22, Mr. Cuomo enacted a similar policy, effectively allowing the virus to spread in public for five days. A study from Columbia University found that 17,000 deaths could have been avoided in the metropolitan area if the state and city had enacted a shutdown a week earlier.
“The decision had nothing to do with what was best for New York City,” said Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, who called for an immediate shutdown at the time. “It was absolutely unnecessary to wait.”
During the mayor’s race, Mr. Cuomo has often said that New York was ranked 38th among states when it came to nursing home deaths, based on a 2022 paper from a research journal.
That claim relies on federal data that does not include more than 5,000 deaths in New York during the earliest part of the pandemic. When those deaths are included, New York rises to the seventh worst state in terms of nursing home mortality, according to Bill Hammond, an analyst with the Empire Center for Public Policy.
The Cuomo administration also initially undercounted nursing home deaths by several thousand, according to the state attorney general. The state only counted deaths that occurred within nursing homes, and excluded deaths of nursing home residents who had died in hospitals. Other states released figures that counted residents who had died in hospitals.
The New York Times revealed how Mr. Cuomo and his top aides had edited a report to conceal how many nursing home residents died. Mr. Trump’s Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into Mr. Cuomo and whether he lied to Congress about the deaths.
Mr. Azzopardi has said that the federal investigation was politically motivated and called it “election interference” by Mr. Trump.
During the pandemic, Mr. Cuomo made “decisions based on the experts’ advice and the information available at the time,” he said. He said the delay in the shutdown had been “rational” and necessary to help get New Yorkers on board with difficult restrictions.
Fights Over School Funding
The mayor runs the nation’s largest school system with nearly one million students.
But as governor, Mr. Cuomo cut funding for schools after the 2008 recession and refused to fully fund crucial support known as “foundation aid” that helps struggling schools. The fund was $4 billion short, prompting a lawsuit that was settled in 2021.
John Liu, a Democratic state senator from Queens who chairs the New York City Education Committee, ran for the Senate in 2018 almost entirely on the issue of inadequate school funding. He ousted a lawmaker who had worked with Mr. Cuomo and Republicans as part of an alliance called the Independent Democratic Conference, which often prioritized charter schools.
“Cuomo starved the public schools of New York State billions of dollars,” Mr. Liu said. “To be fair, it happened after the recession, but once the recovery was robust, the school funding should have been restored.”
Mr. Liu, who endorsed Mr. Cuomo’s rival, Zohran Mamdani, in the mayor’s race, praised parts of Mr. Cuomo’s record, including securing $300 million for universal prekindergarten in 2014 after rejecting Mr. de Blasio’s plan to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for it.
Mr. Azzopardi said that foundation aid had been “seized upon by opponents as the only relevant metric.” He said the state’s education budget had risen while Mr. Cuomo was governor, from about $19 billion in 2011 to $28 billion in 2020, and that much of that funding had gone to the neediest school districts.
Still, many educators have not forgiven Mr. Cuomo for his cuts to schools, the City University of New York and public pensions. The union representing 30,000 faculty and staff members at CUNY endorsed a slate of his challengers. The United Federation of Teachers, which represents 75,000 city teachers, made the unusual decision not to endorse any candidate.
“There is no clear consensus among our members in this year’s mayoral primary,” the union said. “It is one of the most polarizing races we have seen from a union perspective.”
Andy Newman contributed reporting
Emma G. Fitzsimmons is the City Hall bureau chief for The Times, covering Mayor Eric Adams and his administration.
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