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From the
Daily News:
The city Department of Environmental Protection sends repair teams to that block — and other spots with scores of complaints — but the flooding persists, residents say.
****All told, four of the five spots with the most 311 complaints are in Queens, where city officials say commercial and residential development outpaced the buildout of critical support infrastructure, including catch basins and storm sewers.****
Seeking to fix the longstanding watery mess, the de Blasio administration has set aside $1.7 billion over the next 10 years to build out the city’s storm sewer system.
The planned “sewer buildout” will “resolve longstanding flooding conditions that affect over 400,000 city residents in southeast Queens,” First Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris told reporters in April 2015.
From
DNA Info:
In an attempt to make up for the loss of nursing home beds at Rivington House, Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday announced plans to build an affordable senior housing and health care facility in a city-owned building under the Manhattan Bridge.
First Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris dropped the news while testifying before the City Council during an oversight hearing on the administration's controversial decision to lift two deed restrictions on Rivington House nursing home for HIV/AIDS patients — a decision that allowed the home to be hawked to a luxury condo developer for $72 million. The mayor's office later made a formal announcement of the plan.
But though Shorris claimed the new facility — a building operated by the Department of Environmental Protection at 30 Pike St. — will replace the "bulk of what was lost in Rivington House," the mayor's office has only said the home will provide housing for more than 100 seniors, while Rivington held 219 beds.\
From the
Observer:
It was a fitting ending for a City Council hearing that was, at its heart, about failures to communicate: another miscommunication.
After two-and-a-half hours of questioning Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris about the city’s decision to lift a deed restriction on Rivington House, which paved the way for the AIDS hospice to be sold for profit to luxury condo developers, his testimony ended with the City Council accusing the mayor’s office of misleading them about Shorris’ schedule.
“The administration misled the Council and the Speakers Office into believing that First Deputy Mayor Shorris’ availability for the hearing this morning would be limited because of events related to the U.S Conference of Mayors in Oklahoma City. This turned out to be false,” Eric Koch, a spokesman for Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito. “At a hearing which focused on government honesty and transparency this is particularly shocking and unacceptable.”
The miscommunication today played out in “real-time,” as City Councilman Ben Kallos, the chairman of the committee on governmental operations put it, when, during the hearing, he asked Shorris why he had to leave—”for the record.”
“I have appointments scheduled,” Shorris responded.
From the
NY Post:
First Deputy Mayor Tony Shorris suffered numerous memory lapses about the Rivington Street nursing-home fiasco, telling investigators more than two dozen times that he couldn’t recall incidents, emails or details, records show.
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s right-hand man claimed he couldn’t remember a meeting with Stacey Cumberbatch, a city commissioner, or the content of any conversations they had about Rivington in 2014.
His schedule showed a July 25, 2014, meeting with Cumberbatch, then head of the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, where the deal was on the agenda.
Shorris also said he believed his decision that the property should remain a nursing home — rather than be sold on the open market — was communicated to the agency.
But he couldn’t recall how.
“I’ve asked myself that question. I do not remember the exact mechanism. I just don’t,” he told investigators for city Comptroller Scott Stringer, according to a transcript of the July 27 interview obtained by The Post through public-disclosure laws.
Asked if he had met with Cumberbatch about Rivington in 2014, Shorris replied, “Probably. I can’t say I remember exactly.”
From
NY1:
As promised, the de Blasio administration on Wednesday released a review of the city's new 911 call-taking system, and two other government watchdogs are sounding an alarm over how the project was managed. NY1's Courtney Gross filed the following report.
Three reviews of the city's long-delayed and over-budget 911 system were released all in one day Wednesday.
"We brought all of the agencies involved together, had a very intense 60-day process, as we promised, and restructured every aspect of this project," said First Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris.
"The people who were in charge of this system truly blew it," said City Comptroller Scott Stringer.
"That is government malpractice at best," said Mark Peters, commissioner of the city's Department of Investigation.
Essentially, all of the reports claim the Bloomberg administration was asleep at the switch.
From
Capital New York:
Thanks to his lack of executive experience, de Blasio was widely expected to name a capable administrator to handle city operations, and [Anthony] Shorris would seem to fit the bill.
Shorris served as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ed Koch, and de Blasio called him “one of the central architects of the Koch administration’s affordable housing program,” which is thought of as one of the most successful affordable housing programs in city history.
Shorris went on to become Koch’s finance commissioner, and then served as deputy chancellor for operations at the Department of Education in the Giuliani and Bloomberg administration.
In the summer of 2003, Shorris, whom the Daily News described as a “moonlighting school deputy,” resigned his position following reports that he had a second job consulting for Local 1199.
The 1199 gig had the approval of both schools chancellor Joel Klein and the Conflicts of Interest Board. But, as the News noted, “Public reaction…was less forgiving.”
“‘Who needs this shit?’ Shorris said to a colleague when he told him of his pending departure,” reported the News.
