Rikers remediation manager expected to cost city nearly $10 million next year
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Steve Banks, the city’s corporation counsel, told the City Council on Friday that the Rikers remediation manager’s budget is expected to cost taxpayers nearly $10 million during his first year of work. File photo by John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit
By Jacob Kaye
The court-appointed remediation manager responsible for addressing the deeply rooted dysfunction and violence on Rikers Island is expected to cost taxpayers nearly $10 million for his first full year of work, the city’s top lawyer said on Friday.
Nicholas Deml, who was officially appointed to serve in the role by federal Judge Laura Swain in February, recently told the city that he and his staff will need $4.3 million for the current fiscal year and $9.8 million in Fiscal Year 2027 to begin solving the longstanding problems that have driven the dangerous conditions in the jails for decades.
New York City Corporation Counsel Steve Banks, who leads the city’s Law Department, told City Council members during a budget hearing on Friday that the city recently agreed to the price tag, which Deml first proposed before officially beginning his work on Feb. 16.
Swain mandated in her May 2025 order creating the remediation manager that the city foot the bill for the court-appointed authority’s work until the city comes into compliance with the 18 provisions of the 2015 consent judgment in the ongoing civil rights case known as Nunez v. the City of New York that she found it to have been in violation of.
The receivership is expected to last at least seven years – and could drag on for several more – potentially costing taxpayers upward of $68 million.
The remediation manager’s cost is far higher than that of the federal monitor, Steve J. Martin, who has conducted oversight of Rikers Island on Swain’s behalf for the past decade. Through the first eight years of his work, Martin and his team billed the city around $2.8 million per year, according to the Daily News.
Deml’s funding was approved by Swain, the only person the remediation manager will have to report to. Throughout his tenure, the remediation manager will bill the city monthly. If the city objects to any of the fees, costs or expenses incurred by Deml, they’ll have to take it up with the judge.
Banks said on Friday that the city had begun to meet with Deml, a former CIA agent who also served as the commissioner of the Vermont Department of Corrections, about the start of his tenure in the role, which comes with extraordinary powers that, in many cases, will allow him to supplant the DOC commissioner and the mayor.
“I think that this is a good moment to make some progress,” Banks said during the budget hearing. “The remediation manager sees his role as helping us get to a place where the agency can operate without a remediation manager.”
“That is a good start,” he added.
Deml’s appointment came after Swain ruled in 2024 that the city had failed to address the dangerous conditions on Rikers, including both abuses committed by correctional officers and violence perpetrated by detainees, during the first decade of the Nunez consent order.
Though an extraordinary judicial action, the appointment of a remediation manager was necessary because city leaders tasked with fixing the jails were “answerable principally to political authorities” which only leads to “confrontation and delay,” Swain said in a November 2024 ruling.
“The current management structure and staffing are insufficient to turn the tide within a reasonable period,” the ruling read. “[The city has] consistently fallen short of the requisite compliance with court orders for years, at times under circumstances that suggest bad faith.”
Swain considered around two dozen candidates after first ordering the creation of a receiver, and selected Deml at the start of the year.
In a biography attached to Swain’s February order, Deml was described as bringing “a people-centered approach to stabilizing organizations, restoring trust, and advancing transparent, accountable leadership to create meaningful and lasting change.”
Nicholas Deml, who was appointed by a judge to serve as her remediation manager, is expected to cost the city nearly $10 million during his first year of work. File photo via court filing
The 38-year-old most recently worked as the managing director of Everly Bly & Co., a boutique consulting firm focused on corrections, public safety and national security.
Earlier in his career, he worked as an aide to U.S. Senator Richard Durbin on the Senate Judiciary Committee and in the Office of the Assistant Majority Leader. He served as the Vermont DOC’s commissioner from November 2021 until August 2025, several months after Swain began soliciting receiver applicants.
While leading the agency, Deml was credited with implementing a “philosophy shift” to help solve several crises within the state’s prisons and jails, according to reporting by Vermont Public. Toward the end of Deml’s tenure in Vermont, the state’s prison population hit a five-year peak with more than 1,550 people behind bars. The total is less than a quarter of the current population on Rikers Island, where 6,800 people were detained on any given day in February 2026.
While Deml has been granted sweeping powers over the day-to-day management of Rikers Island and the Department of Correction – he can hire, train, promote, demote, transfer, investigate, evaluate and fire anyone currently working for the DOC except the commissioner – he’s expected to work closely with Banks and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s DOC commissioner, Stanley Richards.
In February, Richards, the first formerly incarcerated person to hold the top job at the DOC, told the Eagle that he told Deml he was “looking forward to this partnership” during their first meeting.
“Yes, he reports to the judge, I report to the mayor, but our goal is the same, and we're going to be working together,” the commissioner said. “And that’s going to be the seeding that I need to transform the way the department operates, the way the department is seen, the way officers feel and the way incarcerated people experience our department.”
Banks has described a similar working relationship, a change in tone from the adversarial nature of the city’s posture toward the Nunez case during Mayor Eric Adams’ administration.
As one of his first acts in office, Mamdani ordered Banks to create an action plan to bring the DOC into compliance with a suite of rules and laws dictating how the city must treat its detainees.
The plan was finalized last month, and included roughly a dozen strategies aimed at meeting the Board of Correction’s minimum standards and implementing Local Law 42, the 2024 measure prohibiting solitary confinement in the city’s jails.
Implementing much of the plan will first require approval from Deml.
“At Mayor Mamdani’s direction, the Department of Correction and Law Department developed this plan to address long-standing issues in our jail system,” Banks said in a February statement. “We will begin implementing it in coordination with the remediation manager and, when required, the approval of the remediation manager, the monitor and the court.”
“Our goal is clear: achieve compliance with Board of Correction standards, implement Local Law 42, strengthen oversight and improve conditions at Rikers Island,” he added.
