Photo by ianseanlivingston

Looks like a former Metro emergency official put his snowboot-clad foot in his mouth, and Metro is none too thrilled about it.

At a D.C. Council hearing on Mayor Adrian Fenty’s nominee for the head of D.C.’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, former Metro “snow czar” Peter LaPorte became the latest figure to attack Fenty over his leadership, or lackthereof, in the wake of massive snowstorms. According to the Washington Post, Peter LaPorte — who served as Metro’s emergency management chief under Anthony Williams’s administration — testified that Fenty would have had an easier time of things had he run the snow-response effort through the emergency management agency. Instead, Fenty worked closely with Gabe Klein from Department of Transportation and Bill Howland at Department of Public Works, according to the Post. “If I was [asked] how to run that snowstorm, I would have run it out of the emergency management,” LaPorte said yesterday.

LaPorte’s hardly the first person to say that Fenty’s handling of the snowstorm didn’t do the District any favors. The presidents of the police and paramedics unions told the Post that they believed that the Fenty administration underestimated the hazard of a snowpocalypse. As American Federation of Government Employees Local 3721 president Kenneth Lyons told the paper, “We treated it as any other day, and there was no effort to look at this as something that needed emergency planning. . . . We needed help.”