The city has yanked contracts to four nonprofit groups whose grants were frozen in April as part of a broader investigation into the City Council’s slush-fund scandal, The Post has learned.
Among the organizations rejected for council funding is the Metropolitan New York Coordinating Council on Jewish Poverty, a well-respected nonprofit that was given $600,000 from the council in fiscal year 2008.
The Metropolitan Council is losing a $14,000 grant that had earlier been approved by the city Department for the Aging.
A spokesman at the Department for the Aging declined comment. The Metropolitan Council could not be reached due to the Jewish holiday Shavuot.
Another 43 contracts awarded with the council’s discretionary funds were approved, while 29 were returned to the appropriate city agencies because of incomplete submissions.
City Comptroller William Thompson, who has 30 days to approve the remaining contracts, is continuing to review 16 other applications for council funding.
Approvals for the 92 contracts were halted last month as the city Department of Investigation stepped up its probe into the council’s practice of allocating funds to phantom groups and later doling out the money to favored members for pet projects in their districts.
Thompson spokesman Jeff Simmons said the four groups each have had previous contracts with the city, and he did not know why the agencies or the mayor’s Office of Contract Services ordered them pulled.
The Citizens Committee for New York City, which was founded in 1975 by Osborn Elliott and Jacob Javits to provide grants to community volunteer groups, will not get a contract for $78,500.
President Peter Kostmayer was puzzled by the yanked dollars.
“This is the first we’re hearing of it,” he said. “I’m hoping the problem is on their end and not on our end.”
He added that his staffers “are precise, diligent professionals who take great care in preparing all contract paperwork related to government funding.”
One source said the Metropolitan Council and the Citizens Committee are “innocent bystanders” whose funds were caught up in the ongoing investigation.
The Flatbush Haitian Center Inc., funded by freshman Councilman Mathieu Eugene (D-Brooklyn), will not get the $35,000 it was pledged in a contract originally approved by the Department for Youth and Community Development.
A woman who answered the phone at the Flatbush center would not offer details. “It’s not good news, so I guess nobody wants to say” why it was pulled, she said.
Eugene said he’s in the dark about the lost funding.
“I don’t have any idea,” he said. “This is something I should try to find out.”
The Alliance for Community Services Inc., a social services group in The Bronx, is losing a $99,000 contract. The organization did not return a call for comment.
A spokeswoman for DOI did not return repeated calls for comment.