The Brooklyn Public Library is crying poverty to justify selling off its branches despite sitting on more than $100 million in unspent funds, a complaint sent to the city and state attorney general alleges.
Library officials signed off on the $52 million sale of their Brooklyn Heights branch to a developer in Sept. 2015, claiming they needed $300 million to refurbish other branches.
They even testified before the City Council that the city gives them only an average of $15 million a year for improvements.
But as of November the council has designated $158 million to them, an amount that rolled over from prior budgets the past seven years, activists and some former public officials say.
“The capital funds are real,” said one former lawmaker. “They’ll come up with excuses for the money but they’re full of s–t. All the numbers, they pull them out of thin air.”
The sale of the Brooklyn Heights branch to Manhattan-based developer Hudson Companies was part of a “fraudulent scheme” based on “false pretense,” alleges a complaint filed with the attorney general and city Law Department on Jan. 15 by residents and a group called Love Brooklyn Libraries.
“The Brooklyn Public Library has persisted in feigning capital poverty and manufacturing a so-called crisis to further a lucrative real-estate deal which will potentially benefit the library,” it said.
Library honchos dismissed the claims.
“We have accurately and even conservatively estimated the library system’s unfunded capital needs,” said BPL Executive Vice President David Woloch. “Unfortunately, we simply cannot meet our capital needs with the capital allocations we receive each year.”
The library has access to $107 million in city funds for its long-term projects at the beginning of the year, budget documents show, up from $90 million in January 2015. But the organization has spent only a fraction of its cash, about 5.5 percent in 2015, to fix up its buildings, analysts say.
That $107 million has already been allocated to construction projects in the pipeline and most are still in the design phase, BPL executives said.
“We can’t borrow money from one project to shore up another project without that project ceasing to advance,” said library Finance Vice President Brett Robinson.
Woloch and Robinson said the library’s goal to renovate 56 of the its 60 branches would cost over $400 million.
But the library has done little of its own fund-raising to pay for its wish list.
The charity reported $3.2 million in gifts and grants, and $435,000 from events including its annual gala, according to its 2013 tax filings, the latest available. The majority of the library’s revenue comes from the city, which doled out $88 million for its expenses in 2013.
The library spent $76 million on salaries that year and its CEO Linda Johnson pulled down $404,192, tax records show.
State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman declined to review the Brooklyn Heights branch’s sale because the library land was owned by the city and not the nonprofit.