IN the end, MTV decided New York was hotter than Miami for this year’s Video Music Awards.

“New York is our home, and we knew we’d come back here at some point,” MTV executive vice president Dave Sirulnick told The Post yesterday.

The decision to shift the annual awards show back to New York after two years in Florida took MTV officials several months.

“We started talking about it informally last fall,” Sirulnick says. “As we got into November and December, we began to talk seriously about what our options were and came up with some ideas that we thought would be right for New York.”

Besides Miami and New York, the VMAs have taken place in Los Angeles. Sirulnick says that his production team has scouted other cities over the years – including New Orleans.

This will be the fourth time in six years that the VMAs will touch down at Radio City Music Hall. Last year the show, held each August, was nearly disrupted by Hurricane Katrina as it ripped across South Florida before picking up steam on its way to shred the Gulf Coast.

The storm hit four days before the VMAs, causing minor damage to Miami’s South Beach and didn’t force MTV to change any of its plans, including having big stars arrive at the red carpet on yachts.

“It was definitely something that got thrown at us as a hurdle,” he says of Katrina. “But there were no plans that we had to change, there’s nothing I can point to that we weren’t able to pull off [due to the storm.]

“We knew we’re going in at a time in a place that has these weather systems, but it wasn’t unexpected – it wasn’t like an earthquake,” Sirulnick says.