THROW BOOK AT BLASIO
SJP shreds planned $11M in library cuts
Now even Carrie Bradshaw is down on Bill.
While Mayor de Blasio is focused on his against-allodds presidential bid, he’s getting push-back at home from onetime supporter Sarah Jessica Parker.
The “Sex and the City” star, 54, is using a creative online campaign to save Big Apple libraries from de Blasio’s proposed $11 million in budget cuts
Parker (left in 2008’s “Sex and the City” movie) — who backed de Blasio’s 2013 mayoral bid but stayed mum during his 2017 reelection campaign — is urging folks to post virtual “sticky notes” on a petitionlike Web site aimed at telling the mayor and City Council why their library branch is “essential.”
“As Carrie Bradshaw might say, I couldn’t help but wonder: Can New York City survive without strong public libraries?” Parker wrote, channeling a famous phrasing from her “SATC” Bradshaw character, in an e-mail set to be sent to library patrons Monday.
“Could I as a New Yorker accept cuts to our wonderful, important, necessary, and beloved libraries? I’m sorry. I can’t.”
Parker, who is an American Library Association ambassador, said her family particularly adores the Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village.
“It is a cornerstone, a beacon, and one of the most beloved buildings in our community,” she wrote on her own sticky note.
Her publicity effort is a nod to an “SATC” episode where Bradshaw gets dumped via a Post-it note left by her boyfriend.
The new campaign was launched by the New York Public Library and other city library systems.
The proposed cuts come as city libraries are already struggling, said Angela Montefinise, a senior public-relations director of the NYPL system.
They would force local libraries to scale back their hours and days of service.
“The impacts would be especially difficult, as we actually requested $35 million in additional funding this year to cope with rising costs, expanding and new branches to meet [the] growing needs of New Yorkers,” Montefinise said.
Libraries account for less than half of 1 percent of the city’s total budget, she said.
The cuts would include reducing baseline funding by $3 million and cash that the libraries get from the City Council by $8 million.
Last month, a survey of more than 1,000 New Yorkers found that 95 percent believe the proposed library budget cuts would be a major blow to their neighborhoods, according to the polling firm Change Research.
A de Blasio rep didn’t return a request for comment.
BilBill de Blasio wants to live on Pennsylvania Avenue,nue, but he’d be more at homhome on Sesame Street, former mayor Rudy Giuliani said Sunday, mocking de Blasio as “Big Bird.”
“It’s hilarious that our friend de Blasio is running,” Giuliani told John Catsimatidis on his AM 970 radio show, “The Cats Roundtable.”
“America will find out what New Yorkers know. When you call him Big Bird, it’s a compliment,” said Giuliani, just the latest to compare the 6-foot-5 de Blasio to the bumbling, oversize “Sesame Street” canary.
Giuliani, who helmed the city from 1994 through 2001 and is now President Trump’s personal lawyer, said he was “heartbroken” by the lanky lefty’s tenure.
“I took being mayor very seriously. [I] thought I left the city in pretty good shape to Mike Bloomberg,” said Giuliani. “I can’t believe what he [de Blasio] is doing.
“I mean, first of all, he doesn’t work. He doesn’t go to work!”
Less than two years into his second mayoral term, de Blasio on Thursday announced that he would become the 24th candidate to squeeze into the clown car that is the 2020 Democratic presidential field.
After starting off his weekend in Iowa, Hizzoner headed to another traditional battleground state, South Carolina, where his introductory selling point to a half-filled church on Sunday was his wife — who was back home in New York.
“I want to bring greetings from the first lady of New York City, my wife, Chirlane [McCray],” said de Blasio.
“My wife is a woman of strong views and she has taught me a very important phrase . . . We have updated that phrase, we now say that beside every great man stands a great woman,” said de Blasio in the 11minute stump speech, which drew a generally warm reception for its focus on education.
Meanwhile Sunday, de Blasio insisted that he has the chops to oust President Trump at the polls.
“You can tell this guy is a bully who needs to be confronted,” de Blasio said in an MSNBC interview. “Who better than a fellow New Yorker running the biggest, toughest city in the country to take on Trump?”