The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. just awarded $17 million in grants to city institutions looking to tap a pot of post-9/11 reconstruction cash.
And for once, the hopelessly inept LMDC appears to have done something right: It rejected a $5 million request from the backers of the Ground Zero mosque, who wanted the 9/11 money to help pay for their construction and programming.
New York was spared that debasement, but only after The Post sniffed around for weeks, seeking the mosque’s grant application. We suspect the threat of sunlight (and a pile of public embarrassment) had something to do with this happy outcome.
But the truth is, the LMDC shouldn’t be dispensing any cash — or even exist at all.
In 2006, for starters, then-Gov. George Pataki announced that it would be closed within months.
And back in March, a top official at the agency that oversees it announced he was “ready for the next step, which is the winding down of LMDC.”
Apparently “winding down” means spending millions of taxpayer dollars on projects of debatable public worth, including $125,000 to spruce up the Battery Dance Company’s rehearsal space, $250,000 to fix up the Paul Taylor Dance Company’s rehearsal space and a cool $1 million grant to renovate Pace University’s (you guessed it) dance rehearsal space.
Dancin’ fools, those lower Manhattanites!
No toe-tappin’ for taxpayers, though.
Of course, it’s of a piece with the general debacle that the LMDC has been since its inception. It was created in 2002 to help rebuild lower Manhattan in the wake of 9/11, funded by a $2.7 billion infusion from the feds. Then it was supposed to go away.
It failed on both counts. Indeed, it did so catastrophic a job of tearing down the damaged Deutsche Bank building near Ground Zero that two firefighters died in a blaze there in 2007, long after the building should have been completely pulverized.
The $17 million in recent grants don’t add up to much, but the LMDC is grasping at straws, looking to justify its existence any way it can. And that’s just not possible: The LMDC just needs to go away.