ALBANY — Gov. Cuomo is blaming “rabid conservatives” who hated his father for the petition drive to get the name of the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge changed back to the Tappan Zee.
“You have an extreme conservative group that is running a campaign against my father’s name, which, personally, is hurtful,” Cuomo told reporters after an event in Monticello on Thursday.
”I believe it’s mean,” he added.
“I believe it’s vindictive… It’s funded by a person named Robert Mercer, who is the same person who funds Breitbart News, the ultraconservative news station, the same person who funds Donald Trump. They are rabid conservatives and they don’t like my father.”
Reclaim New York, a watchdog group backed by the conservative billionaire Mercer family, spent between $10,000 and $15,000 on a poll over the summer that found support for removing Mario Cuomo’s name from the span.
The group also posted a link to the online petition at Change.org, which now has more than 75,000 signatures.
But Reclaim New York spokesman Doug Kellogg said it followed the lead of a Port Chester resident, Monroe Mann, who launched the campaign to keep the historic name on the Westchester-Rockland crossing.
Kellogg said Cuomo’s charge that his group was behind the effort was nuts.
“Like his claims about New York’s booming economy, just because the Governor says something over and over again doesn’t make it true,” he said..
The governor said that there was nothing out-of-the-ordinary about the honor bestowed on his father.
“It’s a brand new bridge,” he said. “It deserved a new name. When you build something new, you normally give it a new name, and we very often pay tribute to past elected leaders.
“At the end of 12 years, there’s nobody who could say (Mario Cuomo) wasn’t a man of quality, who represented this state extraordinarily well and worked hard every day and that’s why the state legislature overwhelmingly passed it,” he said.