Tish James snoozes as NYC charity burns tens of millions

State Attorney General Tish James should be digging into the $100 million pit of waste, lost opportunities and likely self-dealing that is the West Harlem Development Corp., but she’s too busy posing for cameras and losing lawsuits against the Trump administration.Columbia University funded the WHDC in 2009 as a payoff to local powerbrokers as it got the state to use eminent domain to help it swallow a huge chunk of the neighborhood.The nonprofit was supposed to invest those tens of millions of bucks in Harlem economic-development projects, with $20 million earmarked to build affordable housing.Instead, the WHDC became a spout of political patronage, handing out grants to small local Harlem arts or youth organizations, paying fat salaries to politically connected insiders and — bizarrely — allegedly helping to formulate the Council on American Islamic Relations’ “strategy on responding” to Hamas’ Oct.7, 2023, terror attacks and hostage-taking.Economic development and affordable housing? Not so much at all; just a conduit for money, power and influence in the hands of highly connected insiders like current Chair Milton Tingling and Executive Director Zead Ramadan, a board member of CAIR-New York.Tingling, a retired judge, was just named to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new Jew-free advisory panel on judicial appointments.Ramadan is the central figure in a federal lawsuit against the WHDC, brought by its terminated director of housing development, Vincent Morgan, who taped his boss Ramadan’s allegedly racist rants about Dominicans, African-Americans, Zionists and Jewish control of New York City.

(Ramadan has denied any wrongdoing.)The dysfunction at the WHDC is well-known among uptown pols, who won’t go on the record about the noxious organization; Columbia has washed its hands of the whole thing after years of peeping about the waste and abuse.Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Please provide a valid email.

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