Picturesque This!

From my new column at City & State: 

The City Council funding process is so intentionally opaque, so jackstraw and piecemeal that it should not even be a surprise to find the Members from Kew Gardens or the Upper West Side sponsoring $75,000 allocations for the High Line.  Yet even one of the sponsoring council members in question was surprised to discover that she had been credited, in the 2013 FY Budget, with such an unusual allocation.  CM Gale Brewer, asked why she had given money to the High Line, which is not in her district, flatly denied the designation, insisting, “First time I ever heard about it.”

Read the rest of it there.