As a vote neared in the City Council on the Kingsbridge Armory redevelopment, only Oliver Koppell was publicly expressing reservations about joining with the Bronx delegation in rejecting the project.

Earlier that week, Koppell held a town hall meeting in Bedford Park where he verbally tussled with constituents who were virtually unanimous in their position that he should vote down the plan if it didn’t include a living wage provision.

“If you want to be responsible for an empty building for next 10 years, that’s you,” Koppell told his audience then. “I don’t want to be responsible for that.”

Add to those concerns Koppell’s support of Mayor Bloomberg in the November election and you’ve got the Bronx Council member most likely to give the project a green light.

But when the vote came, he voted with the Bronx delegation and 44 of his colleagues, in a stunning rebuke of the mayor and one of his top outer-borough economic development priorities.

The Norwood News interviewed Koppell to find out why he voted the way he did.

“I wanted the project to go ahead,” Koppell said, “but I hadn’t made up my mind because we were involved with quite lengthy negotiations with the city to try and get some concessions on the living wage.”

Koppell said the negotiations with the Bloomberg administration were “going ahead fairly positively until Friday [the vote was on Monday], and then at the last minute, the administration took all of their tentative offers off the table, and wanted us to proceed with no concession on living wage,” and no progress on other matters either.

On the day of the vote, Council Majority Leader Joel Rivera told the press that the city’s top lawyer said that  one of the offers — giving direct financial support to eligible workers — might run afoul of the state Constitution.

But Koppell, a former state attorney general, said he believes even that “could have been worked out in my opinion if the city and Related wanted to proceed with it.”

In the end, he said, “everything fell apart.”

Koppell put the blame on the administration. “I felt it was bargaining in bad faith," he said.