Mayor Mehaul O’Leary, in Washington, D.C. for a national mayors conference, has been home for a day and a half from the blinding blizzard that buried the East Coast.
Landing at LAX at 10 o’clock Monday evening, 2½ hours before the marathon City Council meeting would end, the mayor’s first instinct was to text Vice Mayor Andy Weissman, leading the meeting.
Mr. O’Leary decided not to drive to City Hall, interrupt the agenda and break in on a meeting already almost three hours along.
“It would have been disruptive for me to walk in at that hour,” the mayor said.
Mr. O’Leary’s one-stop flight home left Washington at 4:20 Monday afternoon, precisely 48 hours after his original flight would have become airborne.
He is vexed this afternoon over the perceived secretive manner that pertinent travel information was withheld from passengers.
“My flight home was booked for 5 on Friday afternoon,” Mr. O’Leary said. “By all reports at that time, the storm was coming Friday evening. We had known before that about the storm coming.
“But what they never told us, and what was, in my opinion, a bad strategy on the ground for those of us who were visiting, some of us could have changed our flights home to Thursday – had we known what the strategy was.
“The strategy was, the airport decided they did not want any planes on the ground during the storm.
“They were starting to stop flights coming in earlier than when the airport closed,” the mayor said.
“It did not matter that the airport was open. There were going to be no planes.
“The cleanup would have been hampered by planes on the tarmac, surrounded by snow,” said the mayor. “This way, the cleanup effort would have been facilitated.”
What frustrated Mr. O’Leary was that “none of that information got to us until after the airport was closed and nothing could be done.”
(To be continued)
