Chirlane McCray has led a city-run nonprofit into ruin
First Lady Chirlane McCray’s leadership of a city-run nonprofit hasn’t panned out to be as “exceptional” as Mayor de Blasio promised when he gave her the job.
As The New York Times reported this week, the Mayor’s Fund to Advance the City of New York, which funnels private money to city causes, is now raising only a bit more than half as much per month, on average, as it did between 2002 and 2014.
For the first 10 months of fiscal year 2018, it ginned up just $14 million vs. an average $32 million a year through 2014.
As a result, the number of programs the group supports has plunged by nearly a third, from 123 during the mayor’s first year in office to just 85 at last count.
Yet the fund’s spending on itself has grown since 2015 by 50 percent. It employs more people and has even acquired larger digs — with a separate office, for the first time, for its chairwoman, McCray.
Helping explain the funding drop: McCray “has largely been missing in action,” notes the Times. She hasn’t been to her office in nearly a year, and schedules show she spent less than 20 hours in all of 2017 on fund business.
She has also missed more than half the fund’s board meetings (seven of 12) as chairwoman. Bloomberg-era chair Patricia Harris missed just one meeting in four years, and she had a day job as deputy mayor.
Nor does McCray seem to play a big role in personally drumming up donations, even though the nonprofit’s chairwoman is officially designated as its “lead fund-raiser.”
And there was a pattern to the fund-raising calls she did make: Almost half were to donors to de Blasio’s mayoral campaigns.
Also notable: Some of the donors had personal stakes in city action, much like those who gave to the mayor’s now-defunct Campaign for One New York, a set-up that sparked state and federal probes and new laws from the City Council.
More staff to do less good; a boss uninterested in getting the real work done; fund-raising with a whiff of pay-to-play: McCray has been “exceptional” after all — in remaking the Mayor’s Fund in her hubby’s image.