Fake Charities
NY Post
“City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s office hid millions of taxpayer dollars by allocating grants to phantom organizations as a way of holding the funds to dole out for political favors later.”
USA Today
“Quinn … has tried to make open government a hallmark of her agenda. With federal and city investigators now looking into the fake funding and other council finance issues, she could end up paying the political consequences.”
NY Daily News
“City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, self-proclaimed champion of open government and would-be successor to Mayor Bloomberg, has a new title: Queen of the Slush Funds. Quinn acknowledged Thursday her office hid millions of dollars in the city budget during 2007 and 2008 under the names of some 30 bogus nonprofit groups.”
NY Politics
“Among the dozens of fabricated groups that were slated to receive funds were the Immigration Improvement Project of New York” ($300,000), the “Coalition for a Strong Special Education” ($400,000) and the “American Association of Concerned Veterans” ($422,763). The total amount set aside in 2007 and 2008 for the fake organizations . . .was $4.7 million.”
Thirteen
“Back in 2008, a federal investigation revealed that the City Council had been giving money from the Council’s budgeted discretionary funds to fictitious organizations since 2001. The revelation was particularly embarrassing for Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who had been an advocate for increased transparency in the city budget process.”
Local & Federal Investigations
NY Times
“The lawyer retained by Ms. Quinn … will be paid with city funds, as will Sullivan & Cromwell, a firm that the Council has hired to assist in responding to the investigation.”
NY Post
“Ex-federal prosecutor Lee Richards, who charges $600 an hour, has been hired as personal criminal defense lawyer for Council Speaker Christine Quinn.”
NY Magazine
“Quinn is tormented by the idea that more surprises may lie ahead. ‘Not having control over any situation for anybody is a terrifying thing. If you’re somebody who likes control, it’s even more terrifying.’”
NY Post
“The firm Brune and Richard was hired Sept. 30 with a $90,000 retainer – and no public announcement. This, despite assurances from Quinn the process would be transparent.”
Lying to the Public
Slush Fund Press Conference
BEFORE: “No. These monies were largely used to fix errors and for mid-year budget requests.” (Christine Quinn’s response to the question, “Did you use any of this money to reward Council Members or for favors?”)
NY Magazine
AFTER: “Did I think, as Speaker, having the [reserve] money to give out through the year might give me political leverage? Of course I did. I’m not going to lie to people that I didn’t think that.”
NY Post
“Quinn said she recognized that her interest in using the council’s discretionary funds for political purposes contradicts her reform agenda and push for ‘transparency.”
Slush Fund Press Conference
“I was obviously very deeply troubled when I found out about this information. I had no knowledge of it. I did not know this was the practice.” (Christine Quinn answers a question about her office’s allocation of millions of dollars to fake charities.)
NY Times
“Christine C. Quinn took her post in 2006 with the promise of bringing more transparency to spending but instead has presided during a time pockmarked by a persistent scandal.”
Village Voice
“Two clips of Quinn show that she lied about whether she used money from the council slush fund to dole out district plums to council members. Quinn, as we recall, initially claimed she used the money to cover mid-year budget gaps.”
Piggy Bank
NY Post
“The money, in effect, became a slush fund for the speaker and was later used at Quinn’s discretion to reward groups that were loyal to her and to fund favored council members’ pet projects. The scheme gave “the speaker a stash of cash with which to thank or pay off politically important allies or cooperative council members.”
NY Post
“City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has admitted for the first time that she understood that the multimillion-dollar slush fund gave her political advantage.”
NY Daily News
“Every year, the Council sets aside $50 million to give to favored groups and causes. The spending is unnecessary and serves, in effect, as reelection campaign financing. Worse, Speaker Christine Quinn apportions these so-called member items so as to reward loyalists and punish independent-minded members. Still worse, the program has been rife with ripoffs. To add a veneer of respectability, Quinn established rules that are supposed to ensure that money does not go awry. For example, recipients are supposed to be nonprofit groups that are registered as such with the Internal Revenue Service. Well, Daily News reporter Ben Lesser did some checking. He discovered that 27 Council members, a majority, had tried to direct a total of $300,000 to 39 groups whose nonprofit status had been revoked by the IRS. The offenders included Leroy Comrie, Lew Fidler and Domenic Recchia — all top Quinn lieutenants.”
NY Post
“A private, members-only park in Queens . . . has steadily received more taxpayer-funded grants under the watch of City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.”
The Villager
“The Council has budgeted more than $17 million dollars to fund fictitious organizations, freeing up those dollars to be distributed at the discretion of the Speaker’s Office. . . Reserves of this magnitude were inconsistent with the transparency she (Quinn) had brought to the earmarking process generally.”
NY Daily News
“Speaker Christine Quinn and her members only pretend that everyone who applies for so-called member item funding – for Little Leagues, senior centers and other local programs – has an equal shot at success. In fact, as far as the Council is concerned, some New Yorkers are much more equal than others.”
NY Daily News
“One of her (Quinn’s) major challenges in her expected run (for Mayor) is the so-called slush fund scandal that erupted in 2007. It revealed a longstanding pattern of Council members steering money to groups controlled by their friends or relatives.”
Thirteen
“The (Citizen’s Union) report analyzed budget data from fiscal years 2009-2012 and found a wide disparity in how much discretionary funding different Councilmembers receive, with committee chairs and more powerful Councilmembers receiving a significantly larger share of funds than newly elected members.”
Thirteen
“There is also no correlation between the level of need in a given district and the amount of funding it receives. . . This means that some low-income Council districts have received a large share of funding while other low-income districts have been left out. . . . .These funding discrepancies exist because the Council Speaker has too much power in the distribution of the Council’s discretionary funds, which totaled more than $578 million in last year’s budget.”
NY Post
“A new analysis of how the City Council allocated more than $2 billion in discretionary funds between 2009 and 2012 has found a wide gulf between the haves and have-nots. . . . (Former Council Member Tony) Avella, an outspoken critic of Council Speaker Christine Quinn, said the results should come as no surprise to anyone. ‘Nothing is done by merit,’ he said.”
WNYC
“City Council members received up to $578 million in Fiscal Year 2012 to fund construction projects and a variety of non-profits in their districts, according to new report from the good government group, Citizens Union. Who got what was mostly decided by Council Speaker Christine Quinn — and the distribution, the group contends, was based more on politics than need.”
NY Daily News
“A celebrity-studded campaign to turn a rusting elevated rail line into a glitzy West Side park has received hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars through Council Speaker Christine Quinn. And she’s gotten a little something in return. Officials with Friends of the High Line – the top recipient of Quinn-controlled City Council pork – have given more than $50,000 to her campaigns since 1999, records show.”
New York Daily News
“As the Manhattan Democrat contemplates her campaign for mayor, she enjoys a political boon that has to make her opponents salivate — millions of dollars in pork that’s hers to hand out like party favors…‘Having tens of millions of dollars available to distribute to Council members and their constituents translates to votes,’ said Baruch College political scientist Doug Muzzio. ‘It gives her an advantage, a significant advantage, as a matter of fact.’”
