De Blasio's Deputy Mayor to Testify on Rivington Scandal Thursday

LOWER EAST SIDE, NY — First Deputy Mayor Tony Shorris is set to testify at a City Council hearing on the Rivington House deal on Thursday, a City Council spokesperson told Patch, and he's likely to find a hostile audience. Local elected officials and investigators will want Shorris to clear up questions about his alleged mishandling of the former nursing home's shady sale to a luxury developer.

City Council Member Margaret Chin, whose district encompasses the Lower East Side, is hoping that any outstanding questions from community members will be answered at the hearing, a spokesperson for her office told Patch.

The City Council hearing will also be reviewing a bill, introduced by Chin and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer in May, that would require the creation of a public online database to track all properties with deed restrictions. It would also require the city to notify the borough president, council member, and community board where the building is located at least 60 days before the deed restriction is waived, and a public hearing on the deed restriction 20 to 30 days before it is waived.

"We're just trying to ensure that what happened at Rivington House doesn't happen to any other community in the city," Paul Leonard, spokesperson for Chin, told Patch.

Shorris claimed in interviews with the city's Department of Investigation (DOI) that he didn't know about the February 2016 sale of the Rivington House by for-profit healthcare firm The Allure Group to a luxury developer for $72 million in profit until after it happened. However, emails uncovered by the DOI show that his staff discussed the sale two months before it went through.

NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer's office conducted a five-month investigation into the Rivington House deal and found Shorris was to blame for failing to stop the Allure Group from selling the community staple to a luxury development group. The mayor's office had waived two deed restrictions on the Rivington House in return for $16.1 million, paving the way for The Allure Group to sell the nursing home to a luxury housing developer.

According to Stringer's investigation, the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) had told Shorris in memos that the deed restrictions on the nursing home would be removed. Shorris said he had stopped reading his weekly memos from commissioners "months earlier." He said he had requested for city commissioners to talk to him via phone or email about important matters, but he never specified that the Rivington House was an important matter, according to the Stringer investigation.

Shorris also alleged in conversations with investigators at least 12 times that he had forgotten significant details about the Rivington House's sale, according to transcripts obtained by the New York Post. His schedule showed a meeting with Stacey Cumberbatch, head of the DCAS, on July 25, 2014, and the Rivington House deal was on the agenda. He claimed he didn't remember ever meeting with Cumberbatch, or that they had talked about Rivington House.

The DOI, upon investigating the Rivington House transactions, found "a complete lack of accountability within City government regarding deed restriction removals and significant communication failures between and within City Hall and DCAS," according to the report released in July. It also found that if the mayor's office was at all aware of what each of the two deed restrictions actually entailed, it could've removed just one of them, not both. Removing both, in fact, allowed The Allure Group to sell the building to a luxury developer.

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