From https://www.businessinsider.com/nyc-council-speaker-amazon-h...
the anti-Amazon movement's best shot at stopping the deal was through the Public Authorities Control Board, which the deal needed approval from. New York State Sen. Michael Gianaris, who has been highly critical of the Amazon deal, was just nominated to the board, and his "no" vote could have scuttled the entire project.
Surmise away, but the mayor has been strongly and publicly in favour of the deal, and critical of the people trying to kill the deal. (The guy who really killed it was state senator Michael Gianiaris.)
The problem was that the people who made the deal (de Blasio and Cuomo) didn't have the power, either de facto or de jure, to get it in place.
The people clearly don’t want to give NY that power carte blanche. They want oversight to that power—oversight which they just exercised.