Council Members Give Preview Of Blizzard Hearing
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Bloomberg administration officials are preparing to face a City Council firing squad at a hearing on the storm cleanup next week. Meanwhile, questions about who was running the show as the storm approached are still dogging Mayor Bloomberg. NY1's Grace Rauh filed the following report.Top officials from the Bloomberg administration were absent from Wednesday's City Council meeting. But that didn't stop some members from ripping into them just the same.
"The sanitation commissioner's head remains buried in the snow. He actually had the hutzpah to say he gives his workers an A plus. Seriously?" said City Councilman David Greenfield of Brooklyn.
You could call it a preview of Monday's City Council hearing on the blizzard clean-up. The administration is sending heavy-hitters to field questions.
Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty, Fire Commissioner Sal Cassano, and the commissioner of the city's Office of Emergency Management, Joseph Bruno, are all confirmed.
Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith will also attend. He oversees snow clean-up for the city. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn says they all better be prepared.
"They are well aware that when they come to Council oversight hearings, and this is one where I will be attending," Quinn said. "They need to have answers to questions. I want to find out what went wrong."
Federal and local authorities are investigating a possible slowdown by sanitation workers. The city's Department of Investigation is urging anyone with information to step forward.
Others, meanwhile, are trying to figure out exactly where Mayor Michael Bloomberg was on December 25th, as the storm approached. His aides say that even if he was out of the city, he was still in charge. The mayor didn't want to dwell on his whereabouts when asked about it Wednesday.
Meanwhile, there's some talk in the Council of drafting legislation to require the mayor to notify the City Clerk when he leaves town, so that it's clear who is in charge in New York. Quinn, though, didn't express much enthusiasm about the idea.
"At the end of the day I don't really care if it was the mayor or the deputy mayor who sent the plows. They didn't get there," she said.
The administration's snow response may be put to the test again soon, as forecasts call for several inches by week's end.