Metro

Mayor Bloomberg’s deputy apologizes for blizzard cleanup snafu

The Bloomberg administration official who headed the post-Christmas blizzard cleanup effort apologized today for the first time, saying the city’s botched effort to properly plow streets could have been avoided had a snow emergency been declared before the storm.

“We owe you and all New Yorkers for that lack of performance our administration’s apology and my personal promise not to let it happen again,” said Stephen Goldsmith, who serves as the deputy mayor of operations.

He blamed a series of systemic breakdowns for the disastrous outcome.

Goldsmith, who once served as mayor of Indianapolis, also testified at a City Council hearing that Mayor Bloomberg and other administration officials are continuing to look into what “went wrong.”

Goldsmith said the holiday weekend — and more vehicles on the roadways — made it “particularly challenging” for the city to properly respond to the storm.

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He said the city should have declared a snow emergency the day before the storm hit and cited “insufficient” communication between agencies.

“Given the information available at the time, the decision not to declare an emergency was understandable. However, based on what we know now, an emergency declaration could have yielded a more successful response,” said Goldsmith.

Goldsmith was joined by Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty, Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano and Office of Emergency Management Commissioner Joseph Bruno, all of whom were hit with a barrage of questions throughout the afternoon.

The city was hit with a whopping 20 inches of snow over two days starting Dec. 26, and parts of the outer boroughs — especially large areas of Brooklyn and Queens — were buried for days.

Streets remained unplowed and thousands of vehicles were left abandoned, trapping residents in their homes for nearly a week.

“This is not a criminal investigation,” Councilwoman Letitia James (D-Brooklyn) said before the start of the hearing.

She said members would not ask questions regarding the possibility of a union slowdown on the part of sanitation workers.

James, who chaired the hearing, said law-enforcement officials are the ones handling that aspect of the blizzard cleanup review. But in wrapping up the part of the hearing featuring high-ranking city officials, James asked if there had been any wildcat actions.

Doherty sternly replied, “No,” adding that investigations are currently taking place.

For his part, Goldsmith said that trying to save money was never a consideration in trying to tackle the snow. He also defended sanitation workers when they came up during the hearing.

Later, during the course of the day-long hearing, Goldsmith admitted, “The mayor did not have the information he deserved” to decide whether to call a snow emergency.

Goldsmith and other Bloomberg administration officials in charge of snow removal were buried under an avalanche of criticism after city councilmembers fired snowballs at them in a quest to uncover why streets were not plowed for days following the post-Christmas blizzard.

“The response to this storm was unacceptable,” said City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan) as she looked down at Goldsmith, the highest-ranking administration official at the hearing.

Goldsmith, who was out of town in Washington, DC, at the time of the blizzard, candidly admitted that a discussion about whether to declare a snow emergency was made by two commissioners, but never included himself or Bloomberg.

“It never arrived at my doorstep — or the mayor’s doorstep,” he said, adding that the two commissioners were made the call included Doherty and DOT head Janette Sadik-Khan.

Goldsmith said there was “no organized conversation” about whether to declare an emergency, adding that the mayor was never given a clear picture of what was happening.

“All of us are eager to be accountable to the public and we’re continuing to evaluate,” said Goldsmith.

When James pressed Goldsmith as to why a snow emergency was not called, he said it was because it would have required people to move their cars from major snow routes — something that could have made things worse given that it was Christmas weekend.

Doherty said salt spreaders were ready to go as the flakes continued to fall, followed by snow-clearing plows.

“What we found out was that the salt was not effective,” he said, adding that “temperatures were dropping” as the blizzard progressed and the snow was too deep.

During the grilling, James held up tire chains she said were cheaper aluminum ones that broke as opposed to ones made of steel — but Doherty fired back, saying the chains James held up were not the ones the city used.

He reassured lawmakers that tire chains were not an issue during the blizzard and that a 2006 review showed the city should switch to ones made of hardened nickel.

During the hearing, the Bloomberg administration released a 15-point plan in an effort to prevent future snowstorm snafus — including a vow to rewrite the process for declaring snow emergencies and equip every sanitation vehicle with GPS devices.

In another mea culpa, Bruno said a multi-agency task force should have been put together faster in the hours prior to the storm.

“I should have moved more quickly,” Bruno said, noting, however, that he was in contact with all agencies starting on Christmas Day.

Since the storm, EMS has come under fire — along with Sanitation Department crews — after ambulances were unable to get patients to hospitals and kept getting stuck in the snow.

The Medical Examiner’s Office is still reviewing cases to determine how many deaths were related to weather delays and federal and state prosecutors have launched probes to determine whether there was any criminal wrongdoing linked to blizzard-related deaths.

Quinn said a series of public hearings will be held in each of the five boroughs starting next week.

In the wake of the blizzard, Bloomberg has made several changes, including demoting two Sanitation commanders in Brooklyn and the FDNY’s EMS Commissioner John Peruggia.

Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Queens) pointed out that headcount in the sanitation department was down because of attrition — countering a point Goldsmith had made earlier that the number of staffers within the department had remained unchanged.

“No one saw a salt spreader” on many roads in Queens, said an irate Vallone. “We did not spread salt during one of the worst storms in city history.”

Doherty said trucks were plowing, but a heated Vallone countered, “Maybe they were on highways or in Manhattan, but not in Queens.”

Councilman Jim Oddo (R-Staten Island) agreed, saying the outer boroughs got the cold shoulder from the city.

Oddo said various city agencies should have reached out to councilmembers to see how bad conditions were in particular neighborhoods.

“All they had to do was go to my Facebook page to see how bad conditions were on Staten Island,” he joked.

Doherty said Manhattan was not given any priority during the cleanup and that his agency is ready to handle another storm — anywhere between six to 12 inches predicted to hit our city on Tuesday night.

“We are going to review things,” he said.