Mayor caught wrong-handed in flap
MAYOR DE BLASIO denied Friday that his team withheld from investigators a crucial memo about a Lower East Side nursing home that wound up as condos — but a document obtained by the Daily News shows that’s not true.
The July 29, 2014, memo shows city officials were well aware that a “private sale” of the “high value property” was discussed early on.
On his radio show Friday, WNYC host Brian Lehrer asked de Blasio whether city Corporation Counsel Zachary Carter had withheld the specific memo from the Department of Investigation.
“That’s not true,” the mayor replied. “Zach Carter put out publicly that some of the very memos that were claimed to have been quote unquote withheld had been provided to the Department of Investigation. He literally said, ‘Here’s when we provided those memos in question, here’s the date.’ That was months ago in this case. So this is becoming the telephone game. We provided the information.
“I’m sorry some reporters have just blatantly ignored the fact that we laid out exactly when we gave those memos and we had every reason to be transparent about those memos,” he said.
A document obtained by The News Friday shows the memo provided to investigators on April 11 was almost entirely whited out.
Carter gave DOI probers two blank sheets of paper showing only the memo’s date and the letters “DP” for “deliberative process” — the rationale for withholding the memo.
The document states the memo was “Subject to a confidentiality agreement with the comptroller’s office,” though on Friday Eric Sumberg, a spokesman for Controller Scott Stringer, said, “There is no confidentiality agreement.”
Late Friday de Blasio press secretary Eric Phillips admitted the document was, indeed, turned over to DOI in redacted form. He said a “privilege log” also turned over notified DOI that the July 29 memo was “being withheld.”
Sources familiar with the matter say after DOI received the whited-out version, investigators realized immediately what it was because they’d obtained an unredacted version from another source.
“The Law Department produced the documents in question in redacted form,” DOI said in a statement. “DOI then obtained the contents of those documents from alternate sources and made follow-up demands of the Law Department. Only then did the Law Department meet its legal obligation to produce those specific documents.”
The unredacted memo, written by the staff of a city agency overseeing deed restrictions specifically lists one option for the nursing home was to “allow (a) private sale” and states, “Many nonprofits would want to sell high-value deed-restricted property.”
The home is on the Lower East Side, where property values have skyrocketed in a gentrification gold rush.
The memo goes on to recommend denying the sale and turning the property into affordable housing or transferring it to another nonprofit. Instead the nonprofit went on to sell it for $28 million. The buyer then paid the city $16 million to drop the deed restriction, and sold it for $116 million to a condo developer.
The unredacted memo specifically mentions briefing deputy mayors, including Anthony Shorris, about the proposals.
Shorris has claimed he knew nothing about the nursing home transaction until this year, after the property was sold for an enormous profit.
He claims he believed the sellers always intended to keep it as a nursing home, but DOI found numerous emails and memos sent to and by Shorris about the Rivington St. deal specifically noting that the sellers were considering selling the property for development.
De Blasio also says he was completely out of the loop on the transaction until it surfaced as an issue in March. DOI found notes of a meeting about Rivington that Shorris had forwarded to the mayor in August 2014. The mayor told DOI he didn’t recall that email.
When DOI began looking into the deal, investigators say Carter took the unprecedented step of appointing himself gatekeeper for all documents, and blocked access to the computer hard drives serving the mayor, Shorris and two other top deputies.
Carter also redacted as “Not Relevant” another memo that detailed a second deed restriction waiver request regarding property owned by the Harlem Dance Theater.
De Blasio spokesman Phillips said DOI never asked City Hall for documents relating to other deed restrictions, noting, “Their requests to City Hall were solely