Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday praised Gov. Kathy Hochul for reviving the city's hated congestion pricing plan — and insisted the Big Apple is safe from potential backlash from President-elect Donald Trump.
“When you're a leader, you make tough decisions,” Adams said of Hochul's revival of the deeply unpopular new passenger tax — which Trump has already vowed to “end” in his first week in the White House.
Under the plan, which the Democratic governor halted before the November election — then announced it was back on the table just a week later — cars entering Manhattan below 60th Street would be charged $9 starting next year.
The tally will jump to $12 by 2028 and rise to $15 as originally planned after 2031.
Trump also criticized the plan by calling it a “business killer.”
The Republican New Yorker and Hochul have been at sharp odds over various issues over the years.
However, the two men had a warm phone call after Trump won the November 5 election over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
In the phone conversation, the politicians touched on the city's deteriorating transportation infrastructure, and Trump expressed interest in working with Hochul on fixing Penn Station and the subway, according to sources.
He has publicly insisted that he has the utmost respect for the Democrat.
Hochul has the power to pardon Trump because of his conviction in May on 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide a 2016 secret money payment.
Despite the stark disconnect between Hochul and Trump over congestion pricing, Adams claimed Tuesday that there would be no repeat of the kind of tensions and undermining that plagued the president-elect's first administration and then government. Andrew Cuomo.
“We weren't communicating before. We were fighting and not working together,” Adams said.
“When I said, ‘Let’s turn down the heat, and let’s work together for New York City,’ suddenly we had a different energy.”
Hochul's camp, asked by The Post if the governor feared she would receive any retaliation from Trump for her decision to move forward with congestion pricing, declined to comment.
Instead, Hochul's representative, Avi Small, referred The Post to the governor's comments during Crain's New York Business and Partnership for NYC Fireside conversation Tuesday morning.
“I'm an elected official. I've worked with people across the aisle,” she said when asked about her phone call with Trump.
Hochul said she discussed the “ugliness” that Penn Station represents and confirmed that Trump agreed that “these infrastructure projects cannot be ignored.”
Neither Trump's camp nor Cuomo responded to the Post's requests for comment on Tuesday.
