The Board of Alders meeting Monday night..
It’s official: The nonprofits controlled by a man convicted of repeatedly raping his high school student will not receive the Board of Alders’ stamp of approval to receive state tax credits.
On Monday evening, the alders unanimously voted to approve the city’s 2022 Neighborhood Assistance Act (NAA) Community Program Proposal list, an array of local nonprofit-led programs providing low-income housing and retrofitting buildings that the city recommends for state tax credit-eligible private donations. The list will next go to the state Department of Revenue Services for final approval.
For decades until now, that list has included non-profit housing organizations Edgewood Corners Inc, Edgewood Elm Housing Inc, Edgewood Village Inc, F.O.H. Inc, and Yedidei Hagan Inc, as well as the religious school organization Yeshiva of New Haven Inc. — all of which are controlled by Daniel Greer. The city has historically signed off on those companies benefiting from up to $900,000 in state tax credit-eligible private donations.
Greer is the former head of the Yeshiva of New Haven who was convicted of sexually assaulting a student in 2019. Greer is now serving a 20-year prison sentence. (He has appealed the criminal case). In 2017, a civil jury awarded his victim $21 million in damages.
In a separate ongoing federal court case, Greer’s five housing nonprofits — which have long been on the NAA list — have been accused by his rape victim and former student of funneling him money and shielding him from paying the $21 million civil judgment. Those accusations prompted a federal judge to freeze those organizations’ property dealings.
The city continued to approve requests from six of Greer’s organizations for tax credits on the NAA Community Program Proposal list after Greer’s conviction, and the Board of Alders continued to greenlight this approval. The state allowed these nonprofits to solicit up to $900,000 in tax credit-eligible donations in 2020, but rejected requests for the same amount of money in 2021 despite municipal approvals.
At the time in 2021, Mayor Justin Elicker and the city’s Corporation Counsel Patricia King had argued that the city’s role in the NAA Community Program process was merely “administrative,” and that the city did not actually have the authority to substantively assess nonprofits’ applications for the tax credit. When individual alders raised questions about the Greer non-profits’ inclusion, the Alders’ leadership shut the conversation down.
This time around, however, the city received a letter from state Department of Revenue Services Commissioner Mark Boughton confirming that the city does have the discretion to choose which local non-profits should benefit from NAA tax credits. The city exercised that discretion this year and left the Greer nonprofits’ applications off of the list.
When it came time for the Board of Alders to vote on the city’s NAA program list on Monday, the only public comment came from Prospect Hill/Newhallville Alder Steve Winter. Winter urged his colleagues on the board to support the list as is, citing Boughton’s letter to the city.
“It is now clear” that the city has the authority to make such a decision, he said.
Winter did not mention Greer’s nonprofits. Two weeks before, at a Health and Human Services Committee meeting, the committee’s chair, Darryl Brackeen, interrupted more direct questions from Winter alluding to Greer’s lawsuits with the advice “not to offer any comments concerning pending litigation” on the subject.
The alders present all voted to submit the NAA list to the state.