Last March, Governor George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg stood together and proudly announced an agreement with the Jets to build a US$1.4-billion football stadium on the far West Side of Manhattan.
The deal immediately drew fire from neighborhood groups, other elected officials and, most loudly, the owners of Madison Square Garden, who were upset to hear of a competing sports facility rising nearby.
But both the mayor and the governor vowed to fight to the end to get the stadium built, demonstrating a kinship of economic and political interests rarely shared by Albany and City Hall. But just seven months later, Bloomberg has largely been standing alone.
While officials from both City Hall and Albany say that aides to both of the Republican leaders have made substantial progress pushing the deal forward over the last two weeks, the public face of the stadium battle belongs to the mayor.
It is Bloomberg who makes the weekly case for the stadium, both to the public and to officials in Albany, who are needed to see the stadium through, while Pataki has remained largely silent.
And it is Bloomberg who is taking the heat from stadium opponents around the state. In the most visible example, a television advertisement paid for by Madison Square Garden produced by a longtime political strategist for Pataki essentially calls Bloomberg a liar.
"This stadium is really seen as so the mayor's thing," said Christine Quinn, a councilman from Manhattan who has led the fight against the stadium. Quinn is a member of a group called New Yorkers for Better Choices, which has held several news conferences questioning the mayor's plan to use US$300 million in city funds for the stadium.
In attacking the stadium, the group never mentions the governor's name, even though the state has committed the same amount of money.
"The general feeling is that the mayor talked the governor into this one," Quinn said.
The Madison Square Garden ad so infuriated the mayor and his aides that Bloomberg has called the Garden owners, the Dolan family, liars, "selfish" and a "disgrace," and both City Hall and Jets officials have grumbled that Pataki could have put a stop to it.
When asked on Friday about the fact that the ads were produced by Arthur Finkelstein, who is one of Pataki's political allies, Edward Skyler, the mayor's press secretary, would not comment.
Noticably absent
Even some of Pataki's allies were surprised by his lack of visibility on the stadium issue, seeing it as a reversal of the tacit agreements the two men made long ago: Pataki would take the lead and credit for rebuilding Lower Manhattan, while Bloomberg would pin his legacy to development of the far West Side.
In recent weeks, the mayor and the governor's staff have begun to huddle to try to get the stadium deal completed. "We support the mayor, and we want this stadium to get done," said Lisa Stoll, Pataki's spokesman. Stoll said that Pataki's support for the stadium has never wavered.
"We want the mayor to get the credit for championing this stadium," she said. "But we are his partner in this. The governor has been fighting for this stadium, and he will like to do whatever he can to be helpful."
But one pro-stadium lobbyist who spoke on the condition of anonymity said another round of meetings was not enough.
"A deal of this magnitude can't be worked out by underlings," he said. "There is not a lot of command focus because the governor is focused on Lower Manhattan."
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