Deputy Mayor Tony Shorris to testify at City Council hearing on Rivington House

First Deputy Mayor Tony Shorris is expected to testify at a City Council hearing Thursday over the city-enabled sale of the Rivington House nursing home to Slate Property Group, Adam America Real Estate and China Vanke in a scandal that’s embroiled Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration.

Shorris is scheduled to attend the hearing, which is expected to be a long and contentious grilling over the scandal, Politico reported.

The deputy mayor had previously been interviewed for two and a half hours by an investigator looking into the removal of two deed restrictions by the Department of Citywide Administrative Services that facilitated the $116 million sale in November.

During the questioning by the chief of staff to City Comptroller Scott Stringer, Shorris said he was unaware of the details of the deal until it was essentially over.

He did not have a very effective means of communicating with former DCAS Commissioner Stacey Cumberbatch, who was with the agency until earlier this year.

He had stopped reading routine memos she sent because they were too time consuming, preferring instead she and other commissioners used their best judgment and come to him with priorities.

“Instead, it became more of a mechanism for documenting something that already happened,” he said during the interview. [Politico] – Rich Bockmann