De Blasio Didn’t Know They Were Going To Shut The Subway, Either
Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office
Yesterday’s decision to shut down the public transportation system in the face of an expected super-blizzard was apparently a surprise to Mayor De Blasio, too. In the wake of the storm, which, you may have noticed, was nowhere near as bad as anticipated for New York City, there’s been a lot of finger-pointing about who was responsible for overreacting. In the tumult, an interesting piece of information surfaced: Mayor De Blasio was apparently just as much in the dark about the decision to shutter the subways and buses as we were. He reportedly only had 15 minutes notice before Governor announced the news to the rest of the city. Sick burn, Cuomo.
“We did not get a lot of advance notice,” De Blasio said at a press conference on Tuesday. In fact, he found out at 4:30 pm, about 15 minutes before Cuomo’s televised appearance.
But De Blasio, you know, he’s playing it cool. “All the meteorologists were (saying) 2 feet or even more, and very fast accumulation,” he said. “So I think in that atmosphere everyone was trying to make quick decisions, and the right decision.”
“We understand that a 4:45 p.m. announcement of a closing at 11 p.m. is relatively short notice but we wanted to get the best, most timely information before we made the decision and the public clearly got the message,” Melissa DeRosa, Cuomo’s communications director, told the Daily News.
But it’s not the first time that Cuomo has enacted a New York City-centric policy without consulting the mayor. Remember that 21-day Ebola quarantine? Yeah, De Blasio didn’t hear about that much in advance either. It’s the old dueling state and city interests game playing again, no matter how nice Cuomo and De Blasio are playing it now.
