The city’s former veterans’ services commissioner couldn’t tell Mayor Bill de Blasio that she was resigning because he was too busy running for president.
Loree Sutton told The Post that she wanted to have a sitdown with de Blasio months ago when she decided to step down and run for mayor — but heard crickets in return.
“I had emailed the front office back in early August,” Sutton said Thursday.
“That’s when I told my office I was planning on stepping aside, but I wanted to have a one-on-one with the mayor. I wanted to talk to him about my plans, but he was on campaign trail.
“The schedule just didn’t work,” she added.
Instead, Sutton submitted a formal resignation letter. Her last day on the job was Oct. 31 and she announced her mayoral bid one week later.
“When I realized things were going so fast yesterday I emailed him and left a voicemail for him,” she said. ‘He’s been so supportive.”
But the mayor apparently didn’t get her message until after the news broke that Sutton was jumping in the race.
“No, she hasn’t talked to me about it,” de Blasio said at an unrelated press conference Wednesday afternoon.
“I think very highly of Commissioner Sutton. She’s a great person. She has not talked to me at all though about the notion of running for mayor,” he said.
Before dropping out of the 2020 presidential race, de Blasio insisted he had no trouble juggling his mayoral duties and his presidential campaign.
“This was about the mayor’s availability, not campaigning,” de Blasio spokeswoman Olivia Lapeyrolerie said.
“Commissioner Sutton informed us she was stepping down and we immediately started the transition process. The Mayor met with her as soon as he was able and [they] have spoken countless times since, including a press conference announcing her departure and her successor,” Lapeyrolerie said.
Sutton — a 60-year-old former brigadier general who served nearly 30 years in the US Army — moved to Brooklyn from Santa Fe in 2013 with her then-girlfriend, now-wife Laurie Leitch.
“It wasn’t long before we just realized we’re New Yorkers,” she told The Post, while sipping an iced coffee with three brown sugars at a lower Manhattan cafe.
“We were starting to talk faster, we were getting irritated when people were walking slow on the sidewalk,” she recalled.
“We loved the energy, we loved the diversity, and as a same sex couple we loved feeling like we were in the middle of the road. We felt like this was a place where we could really make our home,” she said.
Sutton voted twice for President Barack Obama and then for Hillary Clinton, but she calls herself a centrist Democrat.
She backs many of de Blasio’s policies. She said she’d continue ThriveNYC, keep the Big Apple’s status as a Sanctuary City for illegal immigrants, and supports strengthening the police accountability group, the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
But she pointed to some areas where her approach would differ from her former boss.
Sutton has “different view of the financial and real estate and corporate business domains of New York City,” she told The Post.
There’s a “lack of trust” from the business community toward City Hall following Amazon’s decision not to put a second headquarters in Queens, she said.
“There are bad actors in every single industry but I have never found it useful to make moral judgments about a given group of people,” Sutton said.
She’d also hit the reset button with the City Hall press corps, which has a notoriously combative relationship with the mayor.
“When it comes to relationships with the press, I think I have a little different orientation than the mayor,” she said. “I want tough critiques of who I am and what I stand for.”
Finally she promises to tackle the city’s vast bureaucracy.
“I think you would see less of a reliance on government,” she said.
If elected mayor, she plans to conduct a “bottom up comprehensive scrub of what positions, what functions in city government absolutely have to be filled by city government employees.”