Comptroller Tom DiNapoli ‘not daunted’ by primary challengers

State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli has been a fixture in state government ever since he was appointed to fill the role in 2011. It can be hard to imagine someone else in the office, but challengers have already emerged to primary the Long Island Democrat next year. Drew Warshaw and Raj Goyle are early contenders for the position, and there are rumors that the list of candidates could continue to grow.

DiNapoli plans on continuing his work and reckons that the voters don’t mind him sticking around either. We’ll have a verdict on that next spring, but DiNapoli believes that the best sales pitch he can make is to continue to do the work he is now, namely, a regular blitz of audits on reports on state agencies and government functions. Getting the general populace to hear about it is its own challenge, according to him. But now that he has few people coming for his job, public awareness might rise, even if he said he’d rather focus on his own record than his opponents. DiNapoli recently sat down with City & State to discuss his campaign, time in office and the issues the state faces. This interview was edited for length and clarity. 

What was your reaction to seeing that you’re going to have not one but two – and maybe even more – primary challengers?

No particular reaction. Whenever you run for office, and I’ve done it a few times over the years, you always know there’s going to be a campaign. You don’t know if there’s going to be a primary and a general or just a primary, but I have full confidence in the job that my team and I are doing, and we have a great record to talk about. So I’m not daunted by the notion that I’ll have an even greater opportunity to explain to the voters why they should continue to support me.

Some of your opponents have argued that the role of state comptroller should be reimagined. What do you think this position should mean for New York?

It should mean exactly what it is that we’ve been doing consistently with integrity and with great results. We have the Office of Accountability and Transparency. We are the office that tries to keep New Yorkers informed about what’s happening on the important issues of the day and discharge very key responsibilities that are unique to the office – managing the state’s pension fund, processing payments and contracts payroll for state workers, providing oversight of local governments and looking for opportunities with state agencies and local governments for cost savings to benefit taxpayers. It’s a pretty robust agenda, and one that we’ve fulfilled very effectively.

How do you balance all that? Because there is the pure financial aspect of being comptroller, but you do some audits that, rather than looking at pure fiscal impact, ask how this agency or system is operating. 

What you’re trying to do is, No. 1, promote greater efficiency and accountability in government, but you're also trying to better inform the context for the policy debates that go on in the state. Because, you know, at the end of the day, the comptroller does not have responsibility for policy. The comptroller does not make law. We're not the executive in terms of what the governor does. We're not the Legislature, but the kinds of issues that we bring to the fore and how we give the context of the challenges that we're going through help to inform the legislative debate and the public policy debate that goes on. We've particularly been focusing on an agenda of reports, somewhat informed by audits, but also on policy reports on New Yorkers in need, and looking at issues related to affordability and the challenges that many New Yorkers are facing, whether that's on housing insecurity, food insecurity, poverty rates, and looking at it from not only a statewide perspective, but drilling down, looking at how some of this dynamic plays out from a regional perspective as well. That role of sharpening the pencils and coming up with the ways in which you could still deliver services and do it efficiently, I think that role is going to be more important than ever. 

You’re in the rare group of people in state government who were around when Andrew Cuomo was attorney general and remain as he runs for New York City mayor. How have you seen things change over the years, both politically and in terms of the fiscal issues that New York faces?

Shortly after I became comptroller, we had the Great Recession, which had, obviously, a huge impact on government revenues. We had a huge loss in the pension fund because the markets were way down. I was reflecting the other day that the fellow that ran against me in 2010 blamed the Great Recession on me. That’s kind of what happens in campaigns. You get blamed for a lot of things that aren't quite under your control, but it becomes convenient for people to. … I kind of looked at the guy during one of the debates and said, “I really didn't cause the Great Recession, but how we respond to these crises, that's how one is to be measured.” Certainly the pension fund with how strongly we've been able to rebuild it. We've had a series of challenges. I was in the Legislature for a long time. I was there during 9/11 – I mean, talk about a real challenge for us in New York, and needing to pull together to respond to that. So I think it’s fair to say that we just periodically go through phases of crisis and challenge. 

We’ve never had the challenge of a fundamental restructuring of the relationship between the federal government and the states. For us in New York, that restructuring has a very negative impact in terms of cutting programs that New Yorkers have really depended on. You just take the whole area of health care coverage. The early estimates were 1.5 million New Yorkers would lose health care coverage. The governor's taken some steps to get that number down to probably about 450,000, but still, that's 450,000 New Yorkers that have health care coverage today, and they'll be losing it.

What's also different now from other times is that we are in a much more politically polarized environment. In other times of crisis, there was often an opportunity for people to come together, even on a bipartisan basis. There's a lot less opportunity for that. And that's where I think my role as comptroller – which is appropriately viewed as being a less partisan role, and given my personal style and the many years of relationships that I have in state government – I think that hopefully will enable me to be a voice of credibility and keeping us focused on what we need to do to look out for the well-being of all New Yorkers.

Is it difficult maintaining that stance in the times we’re in now?

It is, because the political discourse is much more charged and much more polarized and much more negative. I've always been a positive person. I always try to say, when I'm running, “This is what I'm running for, not who I'm running against,” and that's very different than the environment we have right now. I don't know, can my little effort change that? Probably not, but I'm not going to let the environment change me. I still think it's important to say, in a positive way, ‘What is your record? What are your beliefs? Have you demonstrated who you are and what you're about?’ I think that's more important than trying to tear down your opponents.

Even before the second Trump administration, there were a lot of concerns that the state budget was getting unwieldy. What is there to be done to bring that number back down? Even compared to other states with larger populations, we spend so much.

Medicaid is one of the big cost drivers of the state budget and you know what I always say, we should start by looking at the audit recommendations that I have consistently put out. We have developed a whole body of work on audits on the Medicaid program that have really identified over the years, hundreds of millions of dollars of cost savings. The challenge we have with our audits, not just on Medicaid, is that the audit does not have the force of law. So we can make recommendations. Some agencies take our recommendations to heart, and they implement changes, and they get a good outcome. Others just say, “Thank you very much, we're not changing what we're doing.” So we try to be persuasive with the quality of our recommendations, but I've always said Medicaid, particularly, is an area where we really need to have greater supervision of the program, because there are many opportunities to save money without hurting people, without people losing services. The broader question, though, on Medicaid is, at the end of the day, how can we – working with the providers, working with labor, working with consumers – make sure that we are being cost-effective? That's kind of something that the Legislature and the governor have to grapple with. With the cuts coming out of Washington, we're going to be forced to look more carefully at the kind of recommendations the Comptroller’s Office does put out there, but really to have a more thoughtful conversation about how we manage this program that many, many New Yorkers rely on.

How long would you want to stay in this role?

When I was in the Assembly, when I was on the school board and as comptroller, you run for the office. If you win, you have a term. At the end of that term, you make a judgment. Do you want to keep doing it? You know? Frankly, I thought about it, and I said, I still thankfully am in good shape, health-wise. I think the work we do is important. I appreciate and value the people I work with. We have a great team of people at the state comptroller’s office, so I’m certainly up for another term, but I’m running to serve for the next four years. Every time I’ve run, it’s only been with the expectation that I’m looking for this next term of office. I’m not thinking beyond that.

I mean, would you be open to an Erastus Corning-style reign?

Well, I'm not. I'm not sure about that, but it is important to point out I am not the longest-serving comptroller. That's Art Levitt. So I'm not necessarily aspiring to be the next Levitt, but it's been a privilege to be the state comptroller. It's a job that I think is very important and as relevant today as it's ever been. My team and I are doing a great job. I want to continue to serve, and I feel fortunate. I've been given this privilege to be the state comptroller, and I'm hoping the voters will continue to have confidence in me. So far, they've shown that. I'm expecting they'll show it again, and we're certainly going to work hard to remind everybody about the great work that we've been doing.

The public often doesn’t have the fullest understanding of what some state government roles are or what they do. What do you think the biggest misconception is about the state Comptroller as an institution?

People tend to focus less on state government, more on federal government, because it gets more press attention, right? Or local government, where something going on in your own neighborhood is very much front of mind, or something you see. State government kind of falls in between. Even when I was in the Assembly, people, they kind of knew I was something, but they weren't sure what, where the state Capitol is or anything like that. The Comptroller’s Office is even more of a challenge, because the office may not always be visible to people. I always say that if we screw up, people will know. If someone doesn't get their paycheck, then they're going to know who the state comptroller is. If they're getting it regularly, then they're not going to know. One of the challenges for state government today – maybe local government also – you just don't have the level of news coverage that you once had. I mean, you see what's happening in the journalism industry; you don't have the number of publications you once had. The publications that you have tend to have economized, they've cut down on staff and they've cut down on coverage. When I first arrived in Albany, you’d go to the LCA area in the Capitol and you couldn't fit all the reporters in the rooms. Now you have some empty space up there. So if you're not getting coverage from the news media, it makes it even harder for people to have a clue as to what's going on in Albany.