RAY KELLY
Commish wasn’t grilled
Maybe they should settle this with a snowball fight.
Defiant Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan — who failed to call a snow emergency in the post-Christmas blizzard but escaped unscathed in the public storm that followed — has now dragged NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly into the slush.
“Frankly, [the Police Department] wasn’t there, and they’re responsible for emergency tow operations,” Sadik-Khan told The Post, which ques tioned her Friday on the perception that she skated through City Council hearings.
She added: “The Police Department could have called a weather emergency, and Ray Kelly wasn’t there.”
Shortly after The Post conveyed Sadik- Khan’s comments to the NYPD for reaction, DOT officials called The Post to beat a hasty retreat, underscoring Kelly’s presence at storm press conferences and the fact that he was never called by the council as a witness in the hearings, and sent two ranking representatives to them.
They further claimed Sadik-Khan was not criticizing Kelly, but simply drawing a comparison between herself and the police commissioner — heads of two agencies with only secondary responsibilities in the storm.
City Hall’s reputation for crisis management was battered by the 20-inch snowstorm, with Mayor Bloomberg suffering a steep drop in polls.
EMS chief John Peruggia, who failed to inform Bloomberg of a 1,300-call 911 back log, was demoted.
The Sanitation Department, criticized for a plowing slowdown during the storm, saw a supervisor shakeup.
But Sadik-Khan, a Bloomberg favorite, appeared unblemished in the blame game.
“She’s heavily protected,” said a high-ranking city source.
At a five-hour hearing last Monday, council members grilled Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty and Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, both of whom apologized for the city’s performance after the Dec. 26 storm.
Sadik-Khan sat in the second row, virtually ignored.
She told The Post she took marching orders from Doherty on the snow-emergency decision, a classification that would have banned vehicles from parking on 250 major thoroughfares.
Doherty confirmed, “I advised her that I didn’t need to move cars parked on 250 snow-emergency streets in order to plow them.”
“I would never second guess John Doherty,” Sadik-Khan said.
She said all agencies learned valuable lessons from the storm, and that “everyone came out of this dinged up.”
