Michael Howard Saul from the Wall Street Journal reports:

[Council Speaker Christine] Quinn has effectively nixed legislation proposed by Councilman Peter Vallone that would require a sitting mayor to publicly report travels whenever he or she leaves the continental U.S. or is more than 250 miles from the city for longer than 24 hours…

The bill would not have required a sitting mayor to report where he or she was headed; it only required public notice if the mayor left the city on a long-distance trip.

According to City Hall, when the mayor leaves town, he gives signatory authority to a deputy mayor. But the mayor’s aides decline to disclose when the mayor leaves town for non-public events, nor do they identify his in-town designee when the mayor steps outside the five boroughs.

This issue came to the fore after Mayor Bloomberg was presumed out-of-town during the December blizzard. Critics said his absence contributed to the city’s poor response. The mayor never revealed his whereabouts, but various accounts put him in Bermuda.

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