CIVIC CENTER — Don’t expect Mike Bloomberg to be yelling from the bleachers when Bill de Blasio comes to the plate next year.
On his weekly radio address, Bloomberg said he'd keep his mouth shut once the new administration takes over.
“In the first year in particular you just don't need a previous mayor saying something,” Bloomberg said. He noted that former mayor Rudy Giuliani had refrained from weighing in during his first term.
“These jobs are tough enough without an extra voice criticizing you,” Bloomberg said.
De Blasio and Bloomberg have regularly been on opposing sides of issues since de Blasio’s time in the City Council. During this year’s campaign, de Blasio positioned himself as the antidote to 12 years of Bloomberg, and took hard positions against the mayor's signature issues such as stop-and-frisk.
Any acrimony between the two appears to have been pushed aside after de Blasio’s landslide win on Tuesday. On Wednesday morning, de Blasio met with Bloomberg at City Hall to discuss the transition. On Friday, Bloomberg repeated his promise to make the process “a world-class transition.”
“We want to make sure that Bill knows who on our staff is in charge…and they start dialoguing,” Bloomberg told WOR’s John Gambling show on Friday.
The mayor said he and de Blasio agreed that the current administration would handle the logistics around the inauguration in January, as well as planning for the Super Bowl, which will come to the Meadowlands in New Jersey.
“It would be easier for him if we do that,” Bloomberg said.
He added that while he is “proud of the accomplishments over the past 12 years,” he hopes the de Blasio administration would build off his success to improve the city even further.
“I hope his administration is even better than ours,” Bloomberg said.
