New York, NY – Bill Would Require NY Mayors to Disclose Trips

New York, NY – A city councilman from Queens, still frustrated that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was nowhere to be found when a blizzard descended on New York last December, plans to introduce legislation next week that would require mayors to report any time they travel more than 250 miles from the city limits for longer than 24 hours, or leave the continental United States for any time at all.

The councilman, Peter F. Vallone Jr., said the bill, had it been in effect last year, would have given elected officials and members of the public a clearer picture of who was in charge when two feet of snow crippled the city.

But the proposal puts Mr. Vallone on a collision course with Mr. Bloomberg, who so covets his privacy that he refuses to acknowledge weekend getaways – even when they become public, as his jaunt to Paris did in 2009 – and has blocked aviation Web sites from tracking the movement of his planes.

“I do not expect him to be at all happy with this,” said Mr. Vallone, a Democrat whom the mayor has endorsed in the past.

Stu Loeser, a spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg, said the bill was unnecessary, pointing to how the mayor had handled previous crises when he was outside the city.

“Whether he’s leading an international environmental conference in São Paulo as he did two weeks ago,” Mr. Loeser said, “or overseeing the Police Department’s response to the London subway attacks from his plane like he did coming back from a meeting about the Olympics in 2005, in this day and age, the person New Yorkers elected mayor can always act as mayor – wherever he or she is.”