People call Bloomberg - The king, but the lady's acts when she has her hand on the cash, hardly gets noticed. While the City Council's discretionary funding ($50M), dispersed by Council Speaker Quinn, are supposedly distributed based on each area's need, Gothamist's interactive map suggests that some areas are surprisingly needier than others, yet receive far less.
Based on the data made public by the city, Quinn's constituents in Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen received the most funding out of any neighborhood in the city, Gothamist finds. While the majority of zip codes in the city received $10-100 per capita, Quinn's zip codes received $396-696 in the past four years—more than 10 times what most of the city got.
Long Island City, Brooklyn Heights and the Financial District were the other big winners of funds over the past four years, receiving $103, $146 and $348 per capita, respectively.
In comparison Brooklyn's heavy populated neighborhoods like Sunset Park, Borough Park, Midwood and Flatbush got a mere $6-$30 per capita, While Canarsie, Ozone Park and Elmhurst residents received only $3.
Anonymous council members, who are afraid to publicly discuss the matter ahead of the budget season, were quoted saying that "discretionary funds will be wielded as a weapon in the fight for endorsements." One council member added, "It’s a legal form of blackmail."
A Quinn spokesman denied the favoritism in funding, saying "Campaign politics play no role whatsoever in funding allocations."
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