Metro

Gotbaum blowing through budget before leaving office

Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum hasn’t been able to absorb a 40 percent budget cut imposed on her office and is spending at a rate that will leave her successor without enough money to cover his own salary much less hire a staff, The Post has learned.

Sources said that by the time she ends her eight-year term on Dec. 31, Gotbaum will have burned through all but $100,000 of the $1.4 million she was allocated for staff salaries — with six months to go in the fiscal year.

There’s another $300,000 set aside for supplies and other non-personnel costs.

“There won’t be enough left for (incoming Advocate) Bill DeBlasio to pay himself,” joked one insider.

The salary of the Public Advocate is $165,000.

Officials said Mayor Bloomberg has agreed to provide an emergency $850,000 to DeBlasio, who’ll be sworn in on January 1, so he can open for business.

“He will be held harmless for the overspending by his predecessor,” said Stu Loeser, the mayor’s spokesman.

When the city’s $59.4 billion budget was being negotiated earlier this year, Bloomberg sliced Gotbaum’s share by 40 percent, from $2.8 million to $1.7 million.

In past years, the City Council has restored the mayor’s reduction from its own share of the budget pot.

But this year, it decided not to.

Gotbaum protested furiously, without success, claiming the mayor and Council Speaker Christine Quinn were getting back at her for opposing the term limits extension.

Sarah Krauss, Gotbaum’s spokeswoman, said she’s since made severe cuts to try to meet the budget mandate — including not replacing 13 staffers who left — and is now down to a bare bones operation with just 31 employees.

“She did everything in her power not to spend money she didn’t have to,” said Krauss.

She also said Gotbaum stopped printing a mandated annual report, sending it out electronically instead, and used private funds to pay for a new guide for immigrants.

Overspending seems to be something of a tradition in the tiny office, which some critics argue should be abolished.

In December 2001, when Mark Green handed over the office keys to Gotbaum, it was only after he had doled out raises of up to 10 percent to his entire staff of 42.

Green made the raises retroactive to the previous July 1, creating a $90,000 budget hole for Gotbaum, which the administration also covered.