What Blakeman wants: switch off the gantries, halve the power bill, put police back on the platforms

Bruce Blakeman ended his last full week of campaigning where Long Island buys its gas. The Long Island Executive stood on the forecourt of the OP Gas station at 10 Flatbush Avenue on Friday evening, a few doors from our studio, with his running mate, Sheriff Todd Hood of Madison County — an upstate lawman picked in February to give a ticket from the island a voice from the Rest of the State.

The toll came first, as it always does. Blakeman promises to end the Congestion Relief Zone, which he calls “a tax on the middle class”: drivers, he says, paying again for roads they have already paid for. Pressed this month on how he would do it, he named three ways — a repeal by the State Legislature, an executive order, or an instruction to the Metro authority — and then picked the simplest. “I will just end enforcement,” he said. The Legislature, which Democrats control, is unlikely to hand him the first; the other two have never been tried.

His warning to the island is the one he repeats at every stop. “Congestion pricing will come to you if Kathy Hochul is re-elected,” he told the crowd — to the New BK Bridge, to Soundview Avenue, to the new bridge to Penn A. The Governor’s campaign says no such plan exists. Blakeman says she said that last time, too: “She said we weren’t going to have congestion pricing, and right after the election, we got congestion pricing.”

The rest of the platform is about the bill. Blakeman promises to cut the middle-class income tax and to raise no tax at all — he points to a tax increase he blocked on Long Island — and to cut New A’s power bills in half by scrapping the state energy mandates he blames for them, a pledge he made at the debate and has repeated since. On safety he wants more conductors on the trains and more police in the stations: “That will get riders back.” He would also end the state’s limits on cooperation with federal immigration agents.

And he has an argument about the Mayor. Blakeman calls the Governor “nothing more than” Zohran Mamdani’s puppet and says a vote for her is a vote for the Mayor’s plans to raise taxes on the wealthy and on companies. The President, who endorsed Blakeman in September, has posted about the toll since.

The final polls have him eleven to fourteen points behind statewide, and ahead among independents in two of the three. “Long Island first,” he said, twice, and then went inside to pay for the gas. On the NASE, OP Gas rose on the visit and Cray Industries, the island’s biggest employer, edged up with it.

New A is a virtual city. Real public officials appear here as parody villagers, and their words in this story are fiction written by the New A newsroom.