DID NOTHING WRONG, SAYS BILL

NEIGH, THEN A YEA FOR DONATIONS

MAYOR DE Blasio personally asked the leader of a group opposed to Central Park horse carriages for a donation while the group was actively pressing City Hall to ban the buggies.

When he was running for mayor in 2013, de Blasio had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the group, New Yorkers for Clean, Livable and Safe Streets (NYCLASS). At the time, the mayor promised repeatedly he would ban carriage horses “on day one” if elected.

In his first year in office, the mayor personally asked NYCLASS founder Steven Nislick for a donation to a nonprofit he’d created, Campaign for One New York.

That’s according to findings released Monday by the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics, which investigated NYCLASS for lobbying without registering as lobbyists. NYCLASS settled with JCOPE by paying a $10,000 fine.

JCOPE found that after de Blasio sought the donation, Nislick promised to write a $25,000 check to the Campaign for One New York and asked a NYCLASS board member, Wendy Neu, to do the same. Neu wrote the check, but de Blasio aide Ross Offinger told Nislick he couldn’t contribute because de Blasio had asked for the donation directly, a violation of lobbying law.

But the following year, Offinger — a longtime campaign aide to de Blasio and, at the time, treasurer of the Campaign for One New York — had a change of heart. He asked both Nislick and Neu to donate $50,000 each, which they did on March 2, 2015. Both Nislick and Neu, in fact, met personally with de Blasio at City Hall four times between February 2015 and February 2016, records show.

“At the time of making all contributions to (the Campaign for One New York), Nislick and Neu were engaged in lobbying activity on behalf of NYCLASS, before the City of New York, including efforts targeting the mayor and senior New York City officials,” the ethics commission stated.

Monday, de Blasio and his aides had no comment on the NYCLASS donations. In November 2015, de Blasio abandoned his commitment to banning horse carriages, stating he didn’t have the City Council votes.