City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander said he’ll refuse to back rival Andrew Cuomo if the ex-governor wins the Democratic nomination for City Hall — and did not rule out running as the Working Families Party candidate in the general election.
Lander’s allies in the left-leaning WFP said they would run their own candidate — possibly Lander or Zohran Mamandi or someone else — in November if the embattled ex-gov. clinches the Democratic ballot line in the June 24 primary election.
“I am very focused, making sure that Andrew Cuomo does not win the Democratic nomination. That is my focus right now. I just don’t have bandwidth for beyond June 24th right now,” Lander said during a meeting with The Post editorial board Wednesday.
“Andrew Cuomo is a corrupt, contemptible human being, who should not be allowed anywhere near City Hall and is an unacceptable choice for mayor.”
Cuomo is the clear front-runner in polls for the Democratic nomination, despite a blizzard of attacks and his ultimate resignation following numerous sexual harassment accusations leveled against him by former Albany staffers and other women and scandals involving his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cuomo has denied the accusations.
While ripping into his opponent, Lander did not go out of his way to criticize surging Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, the Astoria, Queens state assemblyman and mayoral candidate who supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel.
Lander, a Jew and liberal Zionist, said he disagreed with Mamdani on several issues pertaining to Israel.
Separately, the comptroller said he backs the law to close the Rikers Island complex and supports replacing it with four-borough-based jails with a smaller population.
He had voted for the law to phase out Rikers when he was a Brooklyn councilman.
But he admitted Rikers can’t close if the city can’t shrink the jail population by thousands of inmates.
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“If those ways fail, then we can’t close Rikers completely. In order to close Rikers, we have to have successful strategies for dealing with those issues,” Lander said.
For example, hundreds of more treatment beds are needed for criminal defendants who are mentally ill and delays in trials need to be dramatically reduced, he said.
The Brooklyn pol also said he supported Gov. Kathy Hochul’s push to expand the authority to force individuals with serious mental health issues into treatment following the crazed Soho and southern Brooklyn slashings.
“I am seeking flexibility for involuntary hospitalization,” he said.
Lander said Muslim Brunston, the homeless man who slashed a woman in the neck in SoHo and had been in and out of about 36 mental-health hearings for the violent 2019 robbery of a 13-year-old boy — and later slugged an NYPD worker so badly that he broke her eye socket — should not have been on the street.
On education, Lander raved about the Dream Charter school network where his son, Marek, works.
But he opposes lifting the state cap on charter schools in New York City to replicate Dream Charter’s success.
The cap has been reached and new charter schools can’t open without a state law to raise or eliminate the cap.
He called Dream Charter “a fantastic institution,” which has a longer school day and school year and offers students assistance up to six years after graduation.
Asked about lifting the cap to replicate Dream Charter’s success, Lander said he would focus on the 2,800 traditional public schools if elected mayor rather than expanding the popular publicly-funded, but privately managed charter schools.
“I would have a lot of other priorities …It’s not part of my [education agenda],” he said of charter school expansion.
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