De Blasio visits the Upper East Side on Wednesday.
N.Y TIMES
John J. Doherty, New York City’s sanitation commissioner, has had better weeks.
First a storm dumped a foot of snow, as temperatures dropped into the low double digits.
Then residents of the tony Upper East Side accused Mr. Doherty’s new boss, Mayor Bill de Blasio, of failing to have their streets plowed, perhaps in some kind of reverse-elitist snub. They said Mr. Doherty’s old boss, former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, would never have let such a mess accumulate.
A MTA bus travelling east on Livingston Street, Brooklyn slid on the unplowed, icy roadway...Photo: Theodore Parisienne, N.Y. Post
Then Mr. de Blasio himself, after initially defending the Sanitation Department’s performance, backtracked and said that maybe it had not done such a good job after all.
While he did not precisely throw Mr. Doherty under the plow-fitted sanitation truck, Mr. de Blasio said Wednesday that “more could have been done to serve the Upper East Side.”
Mr. de Blasio had asked Mr. Doherty, who has served as commissioner since 2002 (and before that, from 1994 to 1998), to stay on, presumably to prevent such slip-ups.
On Thursday afternoon, several reporters intercepted Mr. Doherty — who had been spotted earlier in the day sitting stiffly outside the mayor’s office — as he left a meeting with aides to Mr. de Blasio.
The mayor’s office said Mr. Doherty had been called in and asked to undertake a full review of the management of the storm on the Upper East Side. Suffice it to say, Mr. Doherty was not eager to chat.