During a five hour hearing yesterday to get to the bottom of the Bloomberg administration's inadequate response to the December 26th blizzard, Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith told the City Council, "We owe you and all New Yorkers for that lack of performance our administration’s apology and my personal promise not to let it happen again." Promises, promises! The Times reports that back in 1994, when Goldsmith was mayor of Indianapolis, he was blasted for being in NYC "while his city was struggling with the snow. But his administration opted not to declare a snow emergency, which would have prohibited parked cars on snow emergency routes."

Fast forward to December 26th, 2010. Goldsmith was kicking it in his posh Washington, DC town house. (Bloomberg has not deigned to tell the public where he was.) Neither men were involved in the decision not to declare a snow emergency, which would have given car owners time to move their vehicles off 300 designated “snow emergency streets," thus clearing the way for plows. In the wake of the blizzard, Bloomberg defended the decision, which was made by the Sanitation and Transportation commissioners.

But now Goldsmith admits it was a mistake not to declare a snow emergency because "the decision to declare a general emergency could have provided a triggering event for those City agencies and other entities that utilize such a declaration as a catalyst for action, and by the public, which potentially might have heard the word “emergency” and ceased driving to the extent practicable." To prepare for the next storm (tonight?!), the administration released a new 15-point plan [pdf]. This plan includes equipping every sanitation truck with a GPS device and creating a website to provide real-time weather updates. It's a Swiss watch! Here are some more nuggets that emerged from yesterday's inquisition:

  • Neither the Mayor nor Goldsmith knew who was responsible for declaring a snow emergency. Now Goldsmith says they've all agreed that the Mayor of the city is responsible for making this decision.
  • At one point, the Times reports, Councilwoman Letitia James of Brooklyn "lifted a set of steel tire chains into the air and accused city officials of employing a cheaper type that she said was prone to break in severe weather. (The administration disputed her claims.)"
  • The Sanitation Department stopped using salt because, according to Commissioner Doherty, the snow was too deep for salt to make a difference.
  • Councilman David Greenfield, who was floodingTwitter throughout the hearing, at one point tweeted, "SMOKING GUN! DOT & Sanitation commissioner did NOT make Mayor or Deputy Mayor aware of No Snow Emergency call!"
  • They say storm cost the city about $38 million.
  • But city officials don't know how many people died due to the blizzard's impact. (We do know that one guy was saved by the city's poor response when he landed in a big pile of uncollected garbage during a suicide attempt.)
  • Councilman Charles Barron demanded that the Attorney General investigate the Mayor and Deputy Mayor for their culpability in the loss of life.
  • 50% of the Department of Sanitation’s trucks currently lack radios; for those that do have radios, one channel serves all of the vehicles in a borough command. As a result, the channels became over-saturated with radio traffic during the height of the response.

And across the five boroughs, the only sound to crackle over the radios was that of a lonely, sad trombone.