Speaker: ‘It is what it is’
CITY COUNCIL Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito dismissed questions Saturday about why she only released her tax returns late on Friday night — two days after securing the powerful post.
“The information was released as it was made available,” she said, claiming that it could not have been released any earlier than Friday night, well known ow as the te dumping ground for r bad news.
“It was made e available when it t was available.”
The Daily News s reported that Mark- Viverito failed to re- port $92,600 in rent- al income from her East Harlem townhouse on city disclosure forms.
Mark-Viverito said she released her tax returns because “there was assumptions made that somehow that wasn’t being reported on my federal income tax. We released five years. It’s been fully disclosed across the years.”
The documents showed she reported all her rental income on her tax returns.
But they also showed the new speaker was stingy in her charitable donations over the past five years.
In 2012, Mark-Viverito made no charitable contributions from her $128,575 income, according to the returns.
The previous year she donated $1,130, which represented a big jump from the past three years when she gave $395, $450 and $600 to charitable causes.
“It is what it is on the tax forms,” she said. “How you want to construe that is up to you.”
On Saturday, Mark-Viverito visited Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network headquarters to thank him for his support.
“It’s a place where we breathe and believe in equity and justice,” she said of Sharpton’s meeting house.
And she took a shot at the “mainstream media” for criticism of her candidacy.
“That demonstrates that they do not have the pulse of where the city wants to go,” she said of the editorial boards that backed her rival for speaker, Councilman Dan Garodnick.
Sharpton said he has been a longtime supporter of Mark-Viverito.
“We go back to her activist days, all the way through her City Council work,” Sharpton said. “She was raised to be the speaker of the City Council.”