The politician who authored the “unlimited sick leave” bill for city employees disabled by the Sept. 11th terror attacks slammed the FDNY in a letter after The Post reported the department is firing the heroes for being out sick longer than a year.

State Sen. Andrew Gounardes (D-Brooklyn), one of the bill’s sponsors, said in the letter sent Monday that “unlimited means unlimited” and the law’s purpose was to prevent this situation from happening.

“These heroic EMTs answered the clarion call to service at one of our country’s darkest hours, and continue to pay the price for their heroism years later,” Gounardes wrote in the missive, addressed to FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh.

“Forcing them off the FDNY’s payroll as they await the processing of their disability retirement application is extremely poor repayment for such service.”

On Sunday, The Post revealed a half-dozen or so FDNY EMS members are facing termination for being out sick with 9/11-related injuries for more than a year, despite a 2019 law that purportedly granted them unlimited time off for the disabilities.

Gounardes said the FDNY’s decision to move ahead with termination “runs counter to the legislative intent” of his bill.

“Unlimited means unlimited,” he emphasized. 

The senator told The Post he hopes to get a response from Kavanagh and from the Law Department and he wants to see the firings reversed.

The unlimited sick leave law, signed by disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo on the 18th anniversary of 9/11, gave various city employees who responded to the terror attacks the same unlimited policy their uniformed counterparts at the NYPD and FDNY received.

But the FDNY and the city Law Department now claim the legislation doesn’t actually guarantee “unlimited” sick time. The state’s civil service law, which allows agencies to fire workers who’ve been out with job-related disabilities for more than a year, supersedes the state bill, city brass said.

The FDNY also claims it’s ridiculous to expect the agency to continue paying an employee who isn’t working for years on end, regardless of whether the injuries are 9/11-related, which Gounardes thinks is callous.

“I write today, therefore, to make abundantly clear that the FDNY’s termination of EMS employees currently receiving sick leave due to a World Trade Center qualifying condition is inconsistent with both the spirit and the letter of this law and to ask that you immediately cease such practice,” Gounardes said in his note to Kavanagh.

He pointed to language in the unlimited sick leave law that states it is “notwithstanding any other law, rule or regulation to the contrary,” meaning it can’t be trumped by civil law as the FDNY claims.

“We feel very strongly based on the language of the bill that we passed in 2019 that the unlimited sick leave provision supersedes any other section of civil service law,” Gounardes told The Post, adding that he reviewed the law with an expert to confirm his opinion.

Bronx EMT Vanessa Rodriguez, a mom of two, spent close to a year collecting body parts at Ground Zero in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, unknowingly inhaling toxic dust that gave her stage three cancer and left her permanently disabled.

Now she is facing termination because she can’t report back to work and told The Post she’s planning on applying for welfare.

When the FDNY informed Rodriguez and the other staffers they’ll be canned if they don’t come back to work, many of them were already in lengthy legal battles with the New York City Employee Retirement System to obtain an early “three-quarters” disability pension. 

But the applications have been denied, some repeatedly, and experts say the court battles can last for years for FDNY EMS members, leaving them trapped in a bureaucratic limbo between sick leave and retirement that wreaks financial ruin on their lives. 

Gounardes thinks the city should focus on “the bureaucratic mess that’s delaying these EMS 9/11 first responders from getting the disability pensions that they obviously should be eligible for … not on firing these employees.”

“This is another insult to add to injury on top of a beleaguered EMS core that is underpaid, undervalued and has historically been so by multiple administrations going back many years,” Gounardes said.

“I really think that it’s time that we recognize and treat EMS workers as we should be and that should start right now with recognizing the service of 9/11 EMS first responders.”

The FDNY didn’t immediately return a request for comment.