Schedules reveal tale of two mayors

If Mayor Bloomberg had taken a page from Rudy Giuliani’s snowstorm playbook of 1996, he might not be getting pilloried for blowing the blizzard of 2010.

A comparison of their public schedules shows that the former mayor maintained a high visibility for a dozen hours a day when the monster storm of ’96 dumped 20 inches of snow on the city.

Giuliani provided updates on the city’s response at 10 a.m., 5:30 p.m. and again at 10 p.m. on Jan. 7, 1996 — the first day of the two-day storm — and then went out to deliver pizzas to the 911 operators at Police Headquarters at 11:30 p.m.

The next day, he toured a sanitation garage, visited Staten Island Borough Hall, took a walk in Queens with the borough president, dropped in on a police precinct house in Queens, checked out City Island and surveyed flooding in Throgs Neck.

Fast forward to last week.

Bloomberg held a single press conference last Sunday, when the storm broke.

On Monday, he had six events, four storm-related. Those included a midday snow update, after which he visited eateries in Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island.

Mayoral spokesman Jason Post emphasized that Bloomberg was in all five boroughs Monday and again on Thursday and that he fielded questions every day from Sunday through Thursday.

“The snow response was not acceptable,” Post said. “I don’t know of anyone who attributes it to too few press conferences.”

Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty, who’s taking heat for this year’s foul-up, was also the sanitation chief in 1996, when he was lauded for restoring the city to normalcy so quickly.

On Friday, Bloomberg said the “biggest difference” between this storm and others was that, this time, buses and other vehicles got stranded on hundreds of roads and had to be towed before plowing could begin.

Public schedules reveal the first-day snowstorm skeds of Mayor Giuliani, after ’96 storm (left), and Mayor Bloomberg:

Giuliani, Jan. 7, 1996