Christiana Fisher (J.C. Rice)
The executive director of the politically connected Ridgewood Bushwick social-services empire is going to come under pressure from the city to resign after a blistering report found she received hundreds of thousands of dollars in questionable retroactive payments, The Post has learned.
City officials are intent on ousting Christiana Fisher, who has run the sprawling agency and its affiliates since 1980, a few years after it was founded by Brooklyn Democratic boss and Assemblyman Vito Lopez, sources said.
“A lot of this comes down to Fisher,” said one source.
In a report released last week, the city Department of Investigation found that Fisher’s compensation shot up from $336,000 in fiscal 2008 to an amazing $782,000 in fiscal 2009.
Agency officials claimed that Fisher and other executives had been underpaid for years and were being given the extra cash with the approval of the board of directors.
But six of eight board members questioned by the department testified that they couldn’t recall any discussion of additional compensation and had no idea how their signatures ended up on resolutions approving such huge payouts.
“Nobody ever told me what they made,” former board chairwoman Lucy Cusimano was quoted as telling investigators.
The dates of the three board resolutions that Ridgewood Bushwick produced to back up the pay packages didn’t correspond with the board’s actual meetings, the department reported.
Fisher’s time sheets for 2008 and 2009 couldn’t be found to confirm that she worked the hours she claimed, investigators also said.
In a separate audit, the Human Resources Administration said it discovered “various inconsistent and undocumented accounting entries” in Ridgewood Bushwick’s home-care program between July 2005 and April 2011.
Getting rid of Fisher will take some doing.
She’s close to Lopez and serves as his campaign treasurer.
Another senior Ridgewood Bushwick official, Angela Battaglia, is Lopez’s gal pal.
In 2009, she took in $343,000, up from $198,000 in 2008.