The Legislature may have eliminated member items back in 2009 after an avalanche of corruption scandals, but that hardly leaves Albany pork-free today.
In fact, the latest state budget is loaded with millions in pork-barrel grants, nearly all added at the last minute without debate — or full disclosure of who inserted them.
There’s $24,523 earmarked for ACORN, the hard-left activist group. Never mind that ACORN closed down five years ago.
As its own general counsel told The Post: “ACORN is deader than a doornail. It doesn’t exist anymore.”
Why’s it getting money? Well, the 2009 ban only prohibits new member-items. Unspent allocations from past budgets can live on.
On top of the ACORN funds, the Albany Times-Union reports, this year’s zombies include $505,000 for Relief Resources, a politically connected Brooklyn agency that was investigated by Gov. Cuomo’s Moreland Commission, which raised questions about its mental-health referral operation.
The group’s funding, said Moreland’s co-chair, “certainly didn’t go to improve the health of anybody in New York City.”
But lawmakers have sent it millions over the years — plainly because it’s chaired by a powerful lobbyist for the Orthodox Jewish community.
A later report by The Forward and WNYC said Relief Resources’ work was well-known and strongly defended by community leaders, but noted it had spent funds on lobbying apparently unrelated to its official activities.
Like ACORN’s funding, the money for Relief Resources was “a reappropriation of unspent funds” from earlier budgeting, the Times-Union reported, but it couldn’t determine who inserted the budget item.
Which only confirms that, as the Citizens Union notes, much of Albany’s spending still gets done “in the shadows” — under a governor who pledged to bring “more sunlight to the operation of government.”