News
Kiryas Joel gets $10.5M in grants for women's center
Pataki, Silver secured bulk of state monies
By Chris Mckenna
Times Herald-Record
July 20, 2008
It was March 2001, and leaders of the fast-growing Hasidic community Kiryas Joel were making their first appeal for state funds for construction of a cherished project: a convalescence home for postpartum mothers.
A letter signed by Mayor Abraham Wieder explained that the work would cost $3.5 million and that the village would pay three-quarters of the bill if the Governor's Office for Small Cities would supply $750,000.
The village later won that grant — then another and another in the ensuing years. As the project cost soared, village leaders repeatedly turned to powerful friends in Albany to tap a host of discretionary funding pots in the state budget — and absorb an ever greater share of the rising tab.
Today, with the center said to be almost ready to open, the total cost has ballooned to $11.4 million, more than three times its initial estimate. Ten state and federal grants have been awarded so far, for a total of $10.5 million. The work has taken four years longer than village leaders predicted.
Three stories high and encompassing almost 50,000 square feet, the women's services center stands as a testament to the grant-seeking ingenuity and political savvy of the leaders of this community of 21,000 people.
Every grant except the first came through discretionary funds — distributed by elected officials — rather than competitive programs. And most of the nearly $10 million in state funds involved can be traced to two politicians from opposite sides of the aisle: former Gov. George Pataki, a Republican, and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat.
Pataki alone steered five grants totaling $5.6 million to Kiryas Joel for the project, according to grant documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Law and officials at the funding agencies.
Once it opens, the 56-bed home will offer mothers a quiet place to relax with their newborns for a week or longer before returning home — a common practice in certain Orthodox Jewish communities. The stay will cost mothers up to $200 a night, according to the village's grant documents.
The village also proposes to use the building for a litany of other women's services, including OB-GYN offices, Lamaze classes, a fitness room and the revival of a county-funded senior-citizen dining program that it canceled six years ago.
Village Administrator Gedalye Szegedin didn't return calls for this story. In May, he argued that it was unfair to focus on the rising cost and duration of the project, rather than on the dogged achievement of an ambitious task.
"We try to have a vision first — a big dream," he said.
From the ashes
Plans for a postpartum care home in Kiryas Joel began soon after the destruction of a similar facility there in 1996, during a rash of violent clashes between the village's majority faction and its dissidents.
A fire, later determined to have been intentionally set, swept through the dissident-run home one night as 34 mothers and their 35 babies slept. All of the occupants escaped without harm, thanks partly to the maid and nurses who passed babies out of windows.
Within three years, leaders of the majority congregation had formed an organization called Aishes Chayil D'Kiryas Joel ("Women of Valor of Kiryas Joel") Mother's Relief Center. And by 2001, the hunt for state and federal money for the center had begun.
Their appeals stressed the high birth rate and low incomes in Kiryas Joel, the growing demand for OB-GYN care and the wide range of services being planned.
Grant administrators in Albany were impressed. Kiryas Joel's application for a Small Cities grant in 2001 ranked the highest of 210 requests for funding that year, earning the village the only competitive grant it would get for the project.
Notification of the award came that September, signed by their old friend, George Pataki.
Village leaders had maintained a rapport with the governor since his eight years as a state assemblyman, when his district included Kiryas Joel. Soon, their powerful friend would become a generous patron of their planned convalescence center.
In 2002 and 2003, Pataki steered two $750,000 Health Department grants to Kiryas Joel for its project, drawing from an account so loosely regulated that the village didn't even have to apply, the Health Department acknowledged in response to a Freedom of Information Law request.
Next, he distributed two grants totaling $3 million through the Empire State Development Corp. He also tapped $1.1 million in Department of Transportation funds to reimburse the village for the cost of building a road to the home.
When applying for $4 million in Empire State Development funds, community leaders had called it "the final financial support necessary for the project." But in a span of weeks, the cost — estimated at $9 million in October 2006 — leaped by another $2.4 million, and the village turned to another funding source.
A $3 million grant
In December 2006, two Democratic state assemblymen from New York City — Joseph Lentol of Brooklyn and Jeffrey Dinowitz of the Bronx — sent virtually identical letters to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, expressing support for Kiryas Joel's project.
"This monumental and unprecedented undertaking by a financially strapped village for the health betterment of its residents and those of its neighbors should be applauded and supported," Dinowitz wrote.
By March 2007, a $3 million grant application — again, "the final financial support necessary" — had passed from the Assembly to the state Dormitory Authority, the funding agency. And a little over a year later, an oversight board on which Silver sits signed off on the grant — a mere formality by then.
A spokeswoman for the Assembly speaker said on Wednesday that Silver, Lentol and Dinowitz sponsored that grant.
The new budget totaled $11.4 million. A spending line that included kitchen, heating and air conditioning equipment had risen by $500,000, according to grant documents. The cost of interior finishing had gone from $700,000 to $1.5 million. There was now a $250,000 line for "overhead and profit."
When it opens, the postpartum center will have been completed at virtually no cost to village taxpayers. There has been robust fundraising within the Satmar Hasidic community to defray remaining costs — generating more than $390,000 in private donations as of last year, according to the village's latest budget.
That and previous plans showed the village contributing $190,000 in land costs. That referred to the appraised value of the project site — property that had been donated to Kiryas Joel for free years earlier.
Over time, village officials had decided that should be their taxpayers' only share of the cost. In their application to the Dormitory Authority, they cited the village's 92 percent low- and moderate-income levels and said they could afford to borrow money only as a stop-gap measure, while awaiting their grant.
"Any long-term financing by the Village will place an undue hardship on the tax burden that Village residents would bear," they wrote.
cmckenna@th-record.com
Grants at a glance
• Date: Sept. 17, 2001
Amount: $750,000
Agency: Governor's Office for Small Cities
Sponsor: N/A
• Date: Jan. 10, 2002
Amount: $492,243
Agency: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
Sponsors: Sen. Charles Schumer, Rep. Ben Gilman
• Date: Dec. 11, 2002
Amount: $750,000
Agency: State Department of Health
Sponsor: Gov. George Pataki
• Date: Feb. 7, 2003
Amount: $750,000
Agency: State Department of Health
Sponsor: Gov. George Pataki
• Date: April 2, 2004
Amount: $1,116,595
Agency: State Department of Transportation
Sponsor: Gov. George Pataki
• Date: April 27, 2006
Amount: $500,000
Agency: Empire State
Development Corp.
Sponsor: Gov. George Pataki
• Date: Dec. 29, 2006
Amount: $2.5 million
Agency: Empire State
Development Corp.
Sponsor: Gov. George Pataki
• Date: Dec. 26, 2007
Amount: $146,000
Agency: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
Sponsor: Sens. Charles Schumer, Hillary Clinton
• Date: April 16, 2008
Amount: $3 million
Agency: State Dormitory Authority
Sponsors: Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, D-Manhattan; Assemblyman Joseph Lentol, D-Brooklyn; Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, D-Bronx
• Date: May 12, 2008
Amount: $500,000
Agency: State Senate
Sponsor: Senate Republicans
Sources: Grant documents; spokesmen from the Empire State Development Corp., the state Department of Transportation and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver
