The city has quietly restored more than $12.5 million in contracts to the embattled social-services agency founded by Brooklyn Democratic leader Vito Lopez that had been held up for weeks pending a sign-off from the state Attorney General’s Office, The Post has learned.
“The city began processing the contracts after receiving verbal confirmation from the [attorney general’s] Charities Bureau that the [agency’s] filings were up to date,” said mayoral spokeswoman Jessica Scaperotti.
The contracts — which cover programs from senior centers to homeless prevention — were frozen on Sept. 20 as the city awaited a routine sign-off from the AG, which registers and oversees charities in the state.
The sign-off finally came on Sept. 27 — but only by phone.
City officials waited weeks for a follow-up confirmation either by e-mail or letter, which would be the normal process. By mid-October, fretting that written approval would never arrive, the officials placed a second call to the AG and were again told that the agency, the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council, had no outstanding paperwork issues.
That was enough for the mayor’s office to proceed. It soon asked city Comptroller John Liu to register the delayed $12,538,232 in contracts, part of the $75 million that flows to the sprawling nonprofit from the city each year.
Ridgewood Bushwick is the largest social-services provider in its Brooklyn neighborhood, and city officials said they were worried about maintaining “vital services like feeding seniors and caring for the homebound elderly.”
A spokesman for Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, the governor-elect, said Ridgewood Bushwick “remains under review” even if its paperwork has been properly filed.
The city put the brakes on new contracts with Ridgewood Bushwick a week after the Department of Investigation released a bombshell report that called the agency’s board of directors a hapless rubber stamp that had no idea what it was approving.
Investigators also uncovered corruption in one of its units and recommended stricter oversight, including a fiscal monitor and an expanded board of directors.
But the corrective plan didn’t touch the top executives — Christiana Fisher, Lopez’s campaign treasurer, and Angela Battaglia, Lopez’s longtime girlfriend.
In a separate action, the Department of Homeless Services has begun auditing anti-eviction services contracts awarded to Ridgewood Bushwick in 2009 in what officials described as a new initiative to audit all Homeless Services vendors every three years.