Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-Brooklyn, is touting legislation passed by the House designating $500,000 for a $25.5 million visitors center under construction at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. She says it “will introduce visitors to this local gem and create new opportunities for the community.”
The Navy Yard has a rich history, but it is an industrial park with a mission to create jobs, not entertain schoolchildren on class trips. Velázquez’s allocation comes even though Congress has received much heat for throwing money at pet projects, such as $900,000 for the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum in Chicago and $500,000 for the Sparta Teapot Museum in North Carolina.
A leading critic of government spending in New York, E.J. McMahon, says: “The visitors center strikes me as a perfectly worthwhile project that the federal government has no business funding. The Brooklyn Navy Yard is a city-owned industrial park managed by a nonprofit corporation; it should be funding its own enhancement out of its own revenues, in combination with private fundraising.”…
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