Mayor de Blasio fired the city commissioner in charge of responding to emergencies and disasters on Monday night.
Joseph Esposito — a long-serving city official — got his walking papers after hours of will-he-stay-or-will-he-go drama at the hands of de Blasio and his aides, who seemed incapable of directly firing him.
Esposito’s departure will be drawn out, said a statement from de Blasio delivered by spokesman Eric Phillips.
“We have started the process of leadership change at New York City Emergency Management,” the statement said. “Commissioner Joe Esposito will continue to lead OEM as we conduct a national search for his successor.”
De Blasio — under fire for bungling the city’s response to a surprise snowstorm last month — for hours on Monday wouldn’t say one way or another whether he wanted to fire Esposito, who he evidently blamed for the sloppy streets that caused a commuter nightmare.
Even Esposito and his top staff weren’t sure before de Blasio’s statement Monday night whether he still had a job, a City Hall source told the Daily News.
Esposito arrived at Gracie Mansion at 2:45 p.m. for a sit-down with de Blasio — and left 100 minutes later, at 4:25 p.m., visibly distressed.
The recent chain of events leading to conflict between de Blasio and Esposito began Friday, when Deputy Mayor Laura Anglin tried to can Esposito by demanding his resignation, a source told The News.
Esposito refused Anglin’s request, apparently preferring to be fired directly by de Blasio. So he continued working, over the weekend and into the start of the regular work week. “Commissioner Esposito is in the office and working,” Office of Emergency Management spokesman Omar Bourne said on Monday.
Reached by cell phone, Esposito, who was out of town during the Nov. 15 snowstorm, said he was doing “great” and referred questions to his press office and to City Hall.
“There’s a lot of misinformation on this here,” he said.
De Blasio wouldn’t clarify the situation when confronted by reporters on Monday afternoon, before his sit-down with Esposito. “We’ll talk to you later on,” de Blasio said.
After he walked out the front door of City Hall to head for the meeting, a member of his NYPD detail prevented several reporters, including one from The News, from following him onto the City Hall plaza, where they might have questioned the mayor further.
The mayor’s press office did not respond to questions about whether a deputy mayor has the power to fire a commissioner.
Esposito’s attempted firing comes after de Blasio has repeatedly refused to apologize for the city’s response to the early-season storm, which brought six inches of snow — not a blizzard, but still enough to gridlock traffic and fell trees.
De Blasio insisted the gridlock resulted from of factors beyond the city’s control — including a last-minute change to the forecast and a massive pile-up on the George Washington Bridge, which is controlled by the Port Authority.
City Council members have blasted the city’s response to the storm — but its members rallied around Esposito on Monday.
Among Esposito’s supporters was Council Speaker Corey Johnson. “My experience with Commissioner Esposito & his team has been a great one and I hear this from other Council Members as well,” he wrote on Twitter. “They are responsive, communicative & helpful when local disasters hit. I hope this isn’t true. Esposito is one of the competent folks in City government.”
Councilman Joe Borelli (R-Staten Island), who chairs the Committee on Fire and Emergency Management, ripped the apparent firing.
“This a guy whose head is rolling who basically made none of the decisions that caused it,” Borelli said.
Councilman Chaim Deutsch (D-Brooklyn) said he spoke to Esposito three times on Sunday — after the deputy mayor had told him he was canned — for help coordinating big crowds at the funeral of a prominent rabbi. He’d just sent Esposito a thank-you note this morning, before he’d heard the news.
Deutsch and Borelli are asking other Council members to sign a letter expressing support for Esposito.
Borelli said Esposito’s agency held a conference call with other city agencies around 11 or 11:30 a.m. on the day of the snowstorm to advice them it would be worse than expected, and that they should plan.
Esposito didn’t make many of the key decisions about the city’s storm response — including when to put plows on Sanitation trucks, whether schools or after-school programs should end. “Pretty much every thing that went wrong that day, was not decided by Joe Esposito,” Borelli fumed.
One commissioner who made some of those decisions — Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia — said Monday in City Hall that she met with Anglin, the deputy mayor, Esposito and other officials Friday afternoon to discuss their agencies’ management of data, but there was no talk of his termination.
Esposito joined OEM after retiring from the NYPD in 2013 as chief of department. De Blasio has long had a shaky relationship with the NYPD, and firing a former top cop could bring him unwanted criticism.
De Blasio has an aversion to firing people — a slew of commissioners or other top aides who were under fire were shifted to other jobs or allowed to retire or resign.
When Homeless Services Commissioner Gilbert Taylor left his gig as the shelter population climbed, it was because de Blasio appointed him as a judge.
Amid massive scrutiny into the botched Rivington House land deal that paved the way for an AIDS hospice to become luxury condos, the Citywide Administrative Services Commissioner was shuttled to a gig at New York City Health + Hospitals, where she kept her salary.
After the death of a child in the city’s care, Administration for Children’s Services Commissioner Gladys Carrion resigned under fire.
Following investigations into his misuse of a city car to the tune of thousands of dollars, Department of Correction Commissioner Joseph Ponte retired. And amid the lead paint crisis, New York City Housing Authority Chair Shola Olatoye was heavily praised by the mayor even as she resigned, a move she insisted had nothing to do with the lead paint situation.
The one notable exception is Department of Investigations Commissioner Mark Peters, who de Blasio fired last month.
With Kerry Burke
