He persuaded a skeptical Legislature to legalize same-sex marriage. He rewrote the state’s tax code in three days. And now, for the crowning achievement of his first year in office, he has brokered peace in the yogurt wars.  Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo was watching TV this week when he spotted a story suggesting that an intercity dispute over a sewer line near a new Wal-Mart was threatening to sink the expansion of a Greek-style yogurt plant in eastern New York.  He directed his assistant to put him on the phone with the mayors of the warring communities and with the head of the yogurt company. And, when he had difficulty reaching the mayors after business hours — one mayor’s cellphone had died — he asked for the police to find them.  Within hours, the cowed mayors announced that they had agreed to settle the matter, allowing Fage USA to proceed with its plans to double the 85,000 tons of yogurt it produces annually in the Mohawk Valley.  “Cuomo Tells Mayors: Settle Yogurt Dispute,” read the headline in The Times Union of Albany. And then, “Cuomo Finishes Fage Battle” said The Daily Gazette of Schenectady — giving Mr. Cuomo one more newspaper clipping to add to his scrapbook.  Fage (pronounced Fa-yeh), founded in Greece in 1926, opened its first and only American plant in 2008 in Johnstown, about 40 miles northwest of Albany. Americans fancy Greek yogurt, it turns out, and so Fage now wants to spend $120 million to increase its production capacity.  No one seems to dispute the worthiness of that project, especially in economically distressed Fulton County, where the unemployment rate stood at 9 percent in October. But as part of the expansion, the company also sought to build a whey pretreatment facility on a parcel of land owned by Johnstown and a neighboring community, Gloversville, next to a wastewater treatment plant they share.  In return for its consent, Gloversville asked Johnstown to change the rules for their jointly run sewer system, so that future commercial development just outside their city, near where the Wal-Mart is being built, could tap into it.  Johnstown objected. The yogurt got caught in the middle. The governor was not pleased.  “The whole year, I’ve said we’re trying to change the perception of the State of New York from an antibusiness state to a state that’s open for business,” Mr. Cuomo said in a telephone interview Friday. “The last thing we should be doing is frustrating businesses.”  Mr. Cuomo reached the mayor of Gloversville, Dayton J. King, at about 5:15 on Tuesday night.  “He said, ‘I want to talk about yogurt,’ ” Mr. King recalled.  Sarah J. Slingerland, the mayor of Johnstown, was home when the local police department called and said the governor was looking for her.  “He said, ‘It sounds like you’re very close to an agreement,’ and I said yes,” Mayor Slingerland recalled, “and he said, ‘Well, I would really like this, because of the economic growth and jobs.’ ”  Mr. Cuomo also called the head of the yogurt company. “I told him that we would work it out, and pardon any inconvenience, but we would work it out one way or the other; we very much wanted him to stay here and to grow,” the governor said.  Mr. Cuomo’s intervention paid off; later Tuesday night, the mayors said they had agreed to settle their dispute. Gloversville would get its sewer hookups; Johnstown would get its yogurt.  “It all worked out, so everybody’s happy,” the governor said, adding that he had Fage yogurt in his refrigerator at home. “My daughters,” he said, “are fans.”
Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York persuaded two mayors to settle a dispute that threatened a yogurt plantâs $120 million expansion.