City rules in favor for non-profit's homeless shelter in Ozone Park after long legal battle

 

City Land 

 A not-for-profit proposed to convert two buildings in Ozone Park into homeless services facilities. In July 2016, Common Ground Management Corporation, a not-for-profit organization, applied to the City of New York for approval of a homeless shelter and services project. The non-for-profit organization intended to convert two multistory adjacent buildings in Ozone Park into temporary housing for homeless adults that would provide medical and psychiatric services, meals, laundry, and showers for stays of up to nine months.

Neighbors in the area sued the City of New York to stop the development of the Ozone Park project. The neighbors claimed that the City had unlawfully segmented the environmental review. The neighbors reasoned that the Ozone Park project was part of the City’s 2017 City-wide plan to address homelessness and asserted that the City was required to conduct an environmental review of each project that was part of the 2017 plan.

Queens County Supreme Court Justice Howard G. Lane ruled against the neighbors, finding that the City had not segmented its environmental review. The court found that the City’s 2017 report was a “general agency policy” and the City had not yet identified specific locations to create the homeless shelters. Further, the facilities to be built as part of the City-wide plan would be sponsored by various organizations, built at different times and by different contractors, and would not be dependent on one another.

Eric Adams got a pile of cash to save his non-profit org's concert promotion from his lawyer and chosen chief of staff

NY Daily News 

A Brooklyn power broker in the running for a job in Eric Adams’ new administration had his law firm make a $50,000 no-interest loan to save a summer concert series closely tied to the mayor-elect, emails obtained by the Daily News reveal.

Frank Carone, a lawyer for the Brooklyn Democratic Party and partner at the politically connected Abrams Fensterman law firm, has served as both Adams’ lawyer and fund-raiser. Emails obtained by The News through a Freedom of Information request shed new light on Carone’s close ties to the Brooklyn borough president and future mayor.

In the summer of 2019, Carone and his law firm came to the rescue of the Wingate Concert Series, which serves as an Adams showcase, after it ran into financial trouble. Adams regularly appeared onstage at the popular annual shows, which have featured the likes of Slick Rick and R&B star Monica. Promotional flyers prominently credited Adams for organizing the free event.

Adams sponsored the series through the borough president’s office and his nonprofit, One Brooklyn. In 2017, he tapped the nonprofit Make Music New York to run the concerts.

Over the next three years, Make Music’s budget ballooned from less than $200,000 to nearly $1 million, and Borough Hall’s annual contribution doubled — from $100,000 to $200,000 — making Adams’ office the group’s top government benefactor, records show.

But in 2019, Make Music’s expenses shot up by $300,000, according to public records.

For the show to go on, the nonprofit needed money fast.

Enter Carone and his politically plugged-in law partner Howard Fensterman. Adams’ deputy, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, introduced them to the head of Make Music New York, James Burke.

“They understand the urgency,” Lewis-Martin wrote to the three men in an introductory email on June 20, 2019. “When others fail, Howard and Frank deliver.”

The Blaz extends his vaccine extortion to city's non-profit contractors

  

THE CITY

 

Tens of thousands of nonprofit workers and other city contractors are covered by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s latest vaccine mandate — presenting new challenges to an already beleaguered sector that includes social service groups.

When Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Monday that all 300,000 municipal employees must have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine by Nov. 1 or lose their pay, buried in the fine print were about 125,000 city-contracted nonprofit workers who also must comply.

It’s unclear how many of those workers are currently unvaccinated and providing weekly proof of a negative COVID-19 test, as currently required for those without the shots. The de Blasio administration has not said whether nonprofit workers are eligible for the $500 vaccine bonus available to city employees.

Nonprofit organizations and union leaders are urging the city to slow down implementation of the new requirement.

“Nine days is a short turnaround to go from a vaccine or test to a vaccine mandate,” said Michelle Jackson, executive director for the Human Services Council, which represents 170 nonprofits in the city.

4motherf-ck-n000,000,000

 

NY Post

More than $4 billion has flowed from City Hall to scandal-tarred shelter operators over the last eight years, accounting for more than a quarter of the money spent by the Big Apple to tackle its homelessness crisis, an examination of city records reveals.

The $4.6 billion in contract identified by the Post account for 29 percent of the $15.8 billion in contracts let by the Department of Homeless Services over Mayor Bill de Blasio’s nearly eight years in office.

The money has gone out to more than half a dozen shelter operators — including the embattled CORE Services Group — which have each been accused of issues ranging from failing to deliver on multi-million dollar contracts to executive profiteering.

Recent newspaper exposés revealed, for instance, that CORE’s CEO Jack Brown established for-profit vendors that paid him handsomely thanks to millions in taxpayer funds from CORE, which also employed several of his friends and relatives. 

 “The idea that public dollars are going to fund lavish lifestyles of nonprofit executives and their families, instead of helping the neediest, should outrage every New Yorker,” said an outraged Councilman Stephen Levin (D-Brooklyn), who chairs the Council committee who oversees the DHS, when told of The Post’s findings.

“That money should be going to get families and children out of shelters and into apartments,” he added. “A child should not be spending a year and a half of their life living in a hotel room.”

For years, homeless activists and social service providers have argued that City Hall underfunded contracts to operate the Big Apple’s shelter system — and, compounding the problem, often failed to pay them on schedule.

That meant well-established organizations often refused to bid on the work, opening the door to less reputable providers.

“The amount of money identified and the amount of scandal suggests there are major, major problems with these contracts,” said John Kaehny, the head of government watchdog group Reinvent Albany, who called on the feds to get involved.

“Only federal investigators have the money and the resources to get to the bottom of this massive systemic failure,” he added. 

 Stephen Levin is outraged about all this, yet he was the one who was appointed to make sure that these "non"-profit provider executives would be grossly profiting off the homeless crisis which has exacerbated under his watch in the last 8 years. The Blaz couldn't find a better sycophantic feckless enabler.

 

 

The city has been funding a homeless services non-profit run by a sexual predator

 

NY Times

 At first, the offer seemed generous. Erica Sklar was in a homeless shelter and needed a more stable place to live. Victor Rivera, who oversaw a network of shelters, including the one where she was staying, said he had a solution: a spare apartment for her at his home in the Bronx.

But after Ms. Sklar moved in, she said, she realized that Mr. Rivera, whose nonprofit organization is one of the largest operators of homeless shelters in New York, had other intentions. In December 2016, he asked to see a leaking ceiling in her bedroom, then turned off the lights, pushed her against a wall and began fondling her, according to Ms. Sklar and two friends in whom she confided.

He demanded she give him oral sex, suggesting he would evict her if she refused, she said. Desperate to hold on to her apartment, she complied.

Ms. Sklar is one of 10 women who said they had endured assault or unwanted sexual attention from Mr. Rivera, The New York Times found. Even as some women have sounded warnings about Mr. Rivera — including two who were given payments by his organization that ensured their silence — his power and influence have only grown during New York’s worst homeless crisis in decades.

His organization, the Bronx Parent Housing Network, has received more than $274 million from the city to run homeless shelters and provide services just since 2017. The pandemic has intensified Mr. Rivera’s importance: As the coronavirus swept through the homeless population, the city gave his group $10 million to provide rooms where infected people could isolate and recover.

 Women reported Mr. Rivera’s behavior to a state agency, a city hotline and, in one instance, the police. But he maintained his perch atop the organization.

One employee of the Bronx Parent Housing Network said that Mr. Rivera, the chief executive, forced her to give him oral sex in 2016 and then fired her, according to police records, interviews and other documents. In 2018, another employee accused Mr. Rivera of groping her and whispering sexual comments in her ear. After both women separately complained to a state human rights agency, the Bronx Parent Housing Network paid them a total of $175,000 in settlements that prohibited them from speaking publicly about their allegations, according to interviews and records reviewed by The Times.

Five of the women were living in Mr. Rivera’s homeless shelters, or had recently left, when Mr. Rivera approached them for sex, they said.

“He’s got a lot of power over a lot of vulnerable girls,” said Ms. Sklar, 49.