New Yorkers last week got a sharp illustration of two kinds of graft that plague the local political landscape here and suck up so much of their taxes — one technically legal, the other decidedly less so.
In the first case, The Post’s Isabel Vincent and Melissa Klein reported last Sunday that one of Rep. Charlie Rangel’s favorite groups, the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, will be the happy recipient of $21 million in state funding — even though it hasn’t launched a single new project in a year.
Indeed, after meeting for the first time in 13 months, its board doled out $3.5 million to three projects — mainly for hiring staff and consultants.
UMEZ was spawned from Rangel-crafted legislation in 1995 and now has about $55 million in its budget.
Alas, it has precious little to show for all that money, in terms of fulfilling its mandate to “stimulate” Upper Manhattan’s economy.
Fact is, the neighborhood has been developing quite nicely, thank you, despite the lack of much notable intervention by UMEZ.
Meanwhile, salaries for UMEZ staffers totaled some $2.2 million in just the last fiscal year.
The second illustration comes by way of Queens, where former Sen. Shirley Huntley pleaded guilty in federal court for her role — first brought to light by The Post — in ripping off taxpayers via the nonprofit group she co-founded.
Huntley admitted that cash from government grants meant for the Parents Information Network — an enterprise ostensibly designed to help parents understand school issues — instead went to personal items for herself and members of her family. (As The Post reported yesterday, thousands of dollars for the group came courtesy of another lawmaker, Assemblywoman Vivian Cook, a Queens Democrat. The two then went on shopping trips on the taxpayers’ dime.)
Huntley now faces two years behind bars and was ordered to pay $87,000 in restitution. But her story is hardly unusual for New York pols.
Former Bronx City Councilman Larry Seabrook, recall, was convicted last year in a similar scheme with nonprofits he controlled. He was sentenced to five years in prison last month.
Huntley and Seabrook are out-and-out crooks; the UMEZ racket, by contrast, is perfectly legal. But they have something troubling in common: They all use “nonprofits” to steer bundles of taxpayer cash to government-selected recipients — without taxpayers seeing much gain for themselves.
Let’s be honest: New Yorkers are getting ripped off by the very people they’re electing.
Question is: Will it ever end?