Selfish bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts -- a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.
Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.
"They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important," said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.
Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department -- and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan -- at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents.
The indignation is thick enough to weld to the front of a truck to use to plow the boroughs. The garbage slowdown killed people! String up the sanitation workers!
Of course a slightly less breathless look at the situation in the Big Apple this weekend reveals a lot more.
But the Bloomberg administration decided not to call a snow emergency. One city official briefed on the response to the storm said it was explicitly considered. But ultimately Mr. Doherty and Ms. Sadik-Khan decided against it, said Seth Solomonow, a spokesman for Ms. Sadik-Khan.
Mr. Solomonow said the forecast was not severe enough.
“As of about 5 p.m. on Christmas Day,” he said, “the forecast called for about a foot of accumulation, which is not uncommon and which is not a basis for a snow emergency declaration.”
Mr. Bloomberg, asked Tuesday why an emergency had not been declared, confused the issue by asserting that doing so would have put more cars on the roads, potentially creating more problems. But clearly, had he declared an emergency shortly after the Weather Service’s blizzard warning, there would have been ample time to move cars before the heavy snow began.
Mr. Hauer called the decision bewildering, and Mr. Bloomberg’s claims misleading.
“We’ve done snow emergencies in the city for decades, many decades, and people have always found a place to put their cars,” said Mr. Hauer, who has had many angry disagreements with Mr. Bloomberg over the years. “You’ve just got to give them enough time.”
A snow emergency would have cleared the roads for emergency vehicles, but it was never declared by the Mayor's office. Oh...and the city often hires private, non-unionized contractors to deal with snow emergencies too.
“If we had the private industry and the front-end loaders early, come in, it would have been a big help, no question about it,” Mr. Doherty said in an interview on Wednesday. “It is a problem.”
The problem, he said, rested largely with him. He said he might have taken too long to make the first calls for private help. He said he had become too consumed with deploying thousands of his own workers.
“Why did we wait so long?” he asked. “Well, maybe that is something we have to look at, no questions about it.”
There are, though, an array of questions about the system for soliciting private assistance. The city’s list of reliable, proven, untainted businesses has shrunk. Any new volunteers have to be vetted; it can take 12 hours to get them rolling.
Unlike years ago, Mr. Doherty said, the private workers just do not seem “interested in the work anymore.”
“Are we paying enough?” he said. “It may be the reason.”
Seems to me the blame for this lies with a city administration that didn't take the threat of a blizzard seriously enough because it would have meant somewhere in America that a local government was spending money on something, clearly an illegal, unconstitutional act in the eyes of wingers. Decisions were made pretty high up to cut corners and this was the result.
But blaming the city sanitation workers for the clogged streets is just idiotic. Wingers expect all this stuff to magically be cleaned up, but don't think anyone should have to foot the bill...especially taxpayers. Governance itself is the enemy, it seems.
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