Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz directed nearly $700,000 in city contracts to a nonprofit he controls – sometimes in amounts just small enough to avoid public scrutiny.

It’s an ethically questionable arrangement that stunned government watchdog Dick Dadey of the Citizens Union when he was told about it by the Daily News.

“If it’s not illegal, it certainly raises some very serious ethical questions and it should be banned,” Dadey said.

“There’s too much opportunity for corruption or the appearance of corruption.”

From 2004 through June 2008, Markowitz doled out $680,496 in taxpayer dollars to his organization, Best of Brooklyn Inc., without competitive bidding or approval from other city agencies or boards.

Among the 18 no-bid contracts were four issued for exactly $24,999 on the same day in 2005.

At the time, city law required contracts worth $25,000 or more to be filed and reviewed by the city controller while smaller contracts got largely no scrutiny.

That threshold was dropped to $5,000 this year in the wake of a City Council spending scandal.

“If there’s four contracts on the same day, just below the amount that needs to be reported, that raises questions as to their purpose,” said Ross Sandler, head ofNew York Law School’s Center for New York City Law. “Youhave to be hiding something to set up a series of contracts like that.”

If the contracts were really a $99,996 contract broken into four parts to avoid public scrutiny, it would violate the law, cityController William Thompson said.

Markowitz created Best of Brooklyn Inc. in 2002, shortly after becoming borough president.

The group gets about half of itsroughly $1 million budget from private donors. The rest comes from the city and state, including money from Markowitz and others.

It promotes Brooklyn tourism, sends poor kids to summer camp and is the force behind events like the Brooklyn Book Festival and Lighten Up Brooklyn, a weight-loss campaign.

The group is essentially a branch of Markowitz’s office, with headquarters in Borough Hall. Three of its seven board members are on Markowitz’s staff, including its executive director, vice president and secretary-treasurer.

Markowitz, Best of Brooklyn’s honorary chairman, got a waiver from the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board to allow his staffers to work for Best of Brooklyn on government time – and to pay Best of Brooklyn Executive Director Carolyn Greer $20,000 above her $94,000 city salary.

Markowitz said the four contracts on the same day were each for different purposes – tourism promotion, a cultural event, sending poor kids to summer camps and helping teens get jobs. The identical amount was coincidental, he said.

Markowitz said it would be impractical to competitively bid each contract, most of which he said are small. “By the time we put it out to bid, we couldn’t get anything done,” he said.

Asked why he allocated money to Best of Brooklyn, which mostly hires consultants to do its work, rather than hiring those consultants through his office or assigning the tasks to his 89 employees, he said the setup allows the group to tap into private donations, too.

“I’m thrilled that Best of Brooklyn has received the public and private support it has, and proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish,” he said.

Source: NY Daily News