Here’s Another Reason Public-Private Partnerships Are Messy

Public-private partnerships, the innovative budget-slimming mechanism that provides services where public institutions cannot or will no longer provide them, will eventually start to get messier and messier as the organizations themselves start to outgrow their initial purposes and seek to expand their reach, just like every organization does once it gets going and gets more powerful.

Case in point — the Post reports on the 34th Street Partnership giving money to build ice skating rinks in the Bronx:

Midtown merchants are giving an icy reception to the 34th Street Partnership’s $120,000 gift to a proposed skating rink in The Bronx.

. . .

The big bucks will instead go to a planned seasonal skating rink 13 miles away in Van Cortlandt Park, where the partnership’s powerful president, Dan Biederman, sits on the park conservancy’s board.

Now if the 34th Street Partnership were just a bunch of Macy’s and Empire State Buildings — or even H&Ms or Gaps — then you might think that this seems like a reasonable way for the organization to be charitable. But, unless I’m mistaken, part of the rules of a Business Improvement District are that every shop owner has to contribute — BIDs clean streets and do things that theoretically help all businesses, so that seems reasonable (if you get out of your head the idea that the City should be doing this in the first place, that is).

In this case there seems to be at least a few small business owners who are not as deep-pocketed as Macy’s who find themselves in a position where they’re contributing to the BID so that the BID does something nice in another borough — and in fact the Post interviews a guy who owns a hardware shop on 33rd Street who sounds like a small business owner, or at least someone who is not exactly Macy’s.

Even if this doesn’t seem unfair to you, it should strike you as messy — public-private partnerships are already shadow budgets, and their boards are much less accountable to the public than elected officials, which is the traditional way transparency happens in municipalities.

The larger issue remains that without the BID money perhaps there’s no skating rink at Van Cortlandt Park — that seems sad, but if an ice skating rink (or seasonal programming in general) is something we prioritize then maybe we should be paying for it. As it stands right now, money is flowing from constituency to constituency (basically “redistributed,” if you consider the needs of a small business owner) without much oversight at all.

And who is to say that it’s being done equitably? And if it’s being done relatively equitably, who is to say that it will remain that way? What is the mechanism for them, in this case, deciding to help out Van Cortlandt Park? Why not a park in Brooklyn or Queens or Staten Island? While it might seem like a noble project now, and all those in charge are presumably making decisions responsibly, who is to say that someday someone won’t take advantage of this process? And when they do, what’s the mechanism for recourse?

Again, that’s what you have city government for — part of the deal is that decisions are made with some degree of transparency, transparency that is lacking when it comes to public-private partnerships. And if not “lacking” then at least murkier.

This will be one of the bigger problems the city will face in the years to come — because while public-private partnerships are sill relatively new, one day they will be as established as even the city’s government is. And there will be a scandal — there will always be a scandal. The question is what protections are in place now to ensure that there is not a new Tweed Ring in the future.