George Pataki wasted $3M in tax dollars for pet project
BY DOUGLAS FEIDEN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Monday, November 5th 2007, 4:00 AM
A rendering of the Museum of Women
A rendering of the Museum of Women
The prime site of public land in Battery City that Pataki set aside for a 10-story museum is likely to finally find use as a badly needed school.
The prime site of public land in Battery City that Pataki set aside for a 10-story museum is likely to finally find use as a badly needed school.
Former Gov. George Pataki wasted nearly $3 million in taxpayer money on a plan to build a women's museum that today is just an empty lot in lower Manhattan, a Daily News investigation has found.
Dreamed up by a commission chaired by his wife, Libby, the Museum of Women burned through state subsidies by hiring dozens of consultants, including two fund-raisers who raised no money.
When the nine-year saga finally sputtered to a quiet end in September, the Patakis' "museum" had raised less than $23,000 from the private sector and procured one "artifact" - a wagon used in suffragette rallies that wound up in an upstate hay barn.
Now that Pataki is gone, Gov. Spitzer and Mayor Bloomberg are expected to announce the plot of highly coveted state land in Manhattan will finally serve a public purpose as the site of a badly needed new school.
"This was a prime site that was frozen in place for years, with no public review, during a school overcrowding crisis in lower Manhattan, because the museum was a pet project of Pataki's," said Julie Menin, who heads Community Board 1.
The museum's saga began in 1998, when Pataki asked his wife to head a 53-member Commission to Honor the Achievements of Women that would celebrate that year's 150th anniversary of the Women's Rights Convention in upstate Seneca Falls.
Funded by a $500,000 state grant, the panel recommended building a museum as a "permanent tribute to women."
The Patakis were honorary co-chairmen and deeply involved in the project. She courted would-be donors while he let the museum work out of the executive chamber, tapped top aides to run it and gave it a prime site in Battery Park City.
By 1999, Pataki steered the first of four discretionary grants that eventually would total $2.2 million from the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation to start the museum.
He provided valuable state office space in midtown and installed two key loyalists to steer the nonprofit organization - Zenia Mucha, his top political operative, joined the board, while Lynn Rollins, his senior adviser on women's issues, was its president.
"I think we're going to see a lot of support for it," the then-governor said when he announced the plans in March 2000.
Plans called for a 10-story, 125,000-square-foot building at Battery Place and First Place with exhibits on the 500-year history of women in America. There would be a roof garden, a leadership center, a trove of artifacts, an electronic zipper to feature news about women - even sculptures of women by womanizing artist Pablo Picasso, planning documents show.
Also on the drawing boards: a depiction of the "Earth Mother," representing Native American ideas of women, and the "Republican Mother," showcasing the role of women in raising U.S. citizens, according to design materials.
None of it happened.
At one point, the museum estimated its price tag would be $146 million, including $27.5 million for exhibits and artifacts.
Consultants - hired with the state funds- called the goal reachable. Business plans were drafted that projected tens of millions of dollars flowing into museum coffers from corporations, foundations and wealthy individuals.
Since the project got underway nearly a decade ago, the museum, which spent $121,000 on fund-raising, raised only $22,650 in private funds, tax filings show.
There wasn't a single corporate donor and only one $20,000 foundation gift. That didn't stop the museum from spending taxpayer dollars on accountants, architects, lawyers, Web masters, public relations consultants and others.
Among the things it wasted money on were:
The wagon. Museum brass harbored big plans to build a world-class collection but obtained only one object, an early 19th century horse-drawn wagon used by the women's suffrage movement for parades and rallies on Fifth Ave.
It was valued at $6,130, but taxpayers shelled out $8,750 to remove pigeon droppings, store it in a barn, turn its wheels every three months to prevent rot and buy insurance.
"A wagon wheel is meant to be moving and rolling to maintain the integrity of both wheel and wagon," said Mary Betlejeski, whose family owns the farm property near upstate Guilderland.
"It's in splendid shape and it's a relatively rare object," said Geoffrey Stein, a senior historian and curator at the New York State Museum, where the wagon wound up.
The phantom Web site. Museum documents also claim "extensive work was done in preparation for launching a Web site." It was never launched. One consultant was paid $19,959 "to plan the architecture of the Web site."
Fund-raisers. Stephen Briganti, the $276,905-a-year CEO of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, got $54,000 from the museum for part-time work as a fund-raising consultant. He didn't raise a dime. Briganti didn't return calls.
Barbara Groves, a development consultant, was paid more than $30,000 after boasting she could "raise an immediate $1 million." The largest individual contributor kicked in $2,500. "We were very optimistic and enthusiastic, but obviously things stalled and we were hobbled by post-9/11 financial difficulties," Groves said.
History Advisory Board. The 18-member board of women's history professors worked with design consultants to plan future exhibits. The museum jetted them from Idaho, Illinois, Michigan and Mississippi to attend meetings in Manhattan, paid them $250-a-day stipends and put them up at the Yale Club. Total tab: $19,405. Rollins said only, "I'm heartbroken that the museum didn't work out."
In late 2005, the community began scouring the neighborhood for a site to locate a desperately needed new public school as families began returning to lower Manhattan.
They saw the museum site as the answer to their needs but were repeatedly told it was "locked up" for the museum.
That changed at the end of last year, when Pataki left office. Museum board members started quitting, state funding slowed to a trickle and the Spitzer administration started reviewing some of its expenditures.
The museum didn't have a lot to show for the money it spent, said Eileen Larrabee, a spokeswoman for the Office of Parks, which administered the grants.
"We reviewed their lack of progress, lack of a product and lack of accomplishments, and it raised a red flag for us," she said.
The museum board met for the last time in April and went out of business. In September, the museum filed dissolution papers, records show.
A spokesman for Pataki said the former governor is disappointed the museum project "wasn't able to gain the traction it needed to move forward."
No comments:
Post a Comment