Responds to Members' Beefs
Quinn Tightens Standards For City Council Grants

By ARI PAUL

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn May 7 unveiled additional budgetary controls in response to last month's disclosure that the law-making body had been appropriating taxpayer money for non-existent organizations that later was shifted to other neighborhood projects.

The Chief-Leader/Adrienne Haywood-James BUDGET REFORM, TAKE TWO: City Council Speaker Christine Quinn re-thought her original plan of having groups applying for Speaker's Office funding go through a Request-for-Proposal system after getting heat from several Council Members. 'I obviously liked the idea of having a competitive process for that $20 million; other people liked it a little bit less, I think it's fair to say,' she said.

Four weeks earlier, the Speaker had announced the creation of an Independent Compliance Officer to oversee spending, a Web site listing organizations applying for funding, and a Request-For-Proposal process for organizations seeking funding from the Speaker's Office.

Bows to Internal Pressure

Last week, Ms. Quinn scrapped the RFP system, which many Council Members believed granted the Mayor's Office too much control over the Council budget. She was conspicuously flanked by more than a dozen Council Members as she explained her change of heart.

"I obviously liked the idea of having a competitive process for that $20 million. Other people liked it a little bit less, I think it's fair to say," she said during a press conference at City Hall.

She announced that groups with budgets exceeding $25,000 would have to be registered with the State Attorney General's Office and that groups seeking discretionary funding would need to be cleared by the Mayor's Office of Contracts.

"Any allocation over $10,000 - whether it comes from the Speaker's discretionary fund, the member items or from initiatives that have Council discretion, so we're talking over $2 million - any of those will now go through a significantly increased vetting process, a pre-clearance process," Ms. Quinn said. "We will have a level of assurance that after they go through this pre-clearance vetting process that they have met a standard of ethics, they have met a standard of business integrity and they have demonstrated a capability to do the work we are seeking that they do on behalf of New Yorkers."

No Disclosure, No Grant

Ms. Quinn added that while Council Members had to disclose conflicts of interest when it came to funding organizations, the law was not specific as to what that meant. Her announcement included a requirement that Council Members list conflicts on paper.

"Members will not have their discretionary items processed if they do not fill out their disclosure forms," she said.

Several government watchdog groups praised the changes, but added that they should be seen as the beginning of a continuing reform process.

"These reforms are not a panacea and will likely require further refinement after we have a year's worth of experience behind us, but properly implemented, they should bring stronger integrity to the Council's budget process and restore some measure of public confidence that their hard-earned tax dollars are supporting legitimate organizations which perform valuable public service," said Citizens Union Executive Director Dick Dadey in a statement.

Liu Not Sold

Several prominent Council Members including Leroy Comrie, Robert Jackson and David Weprin hailed Ms. Quinn's announcement last week. But Councilman John Liu, who had blasted Ms. Quinn's initial budgetary changes in the immediate aftermath of the scandal, remained skeptical of the Speaker's plans.

"These changes are much ado about not much," he said. "They don't even take care of the biggest problem, which has been fictitious organizations."

The practice of allocating money to phantom organizations had been going on under two previous Speakers as well, and Ms. Quinn insisted that as soon as she became aware of it last year that she notified Federal and city investigators. Two aides of Councilman Kendall Stewart were indicted last month on Federal charges of embezzling $145,000 in discretionary funding, with one of them allegedly sending $31,000 to relatives in Jamaica. "Was it a very troubling, inappropriate, unacceptable practice to have fictitious groups in the budget? Yes, without a doubt," Ms. Quinn said. "New Yorkers are right to say it was wrong."