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Pataki raising money for his own museum
The Associated Press

    NEW YORK — Three-term governor and failed presidential hopeful George Pataki has a new project: a museum and learning center honoring his administration.
    Top Pataki aides are raising money for the museum, which has little precedent among U.S. museums or educational institutions.
    “It will be dedicated to educating young people on the value and the importance of public service,” said Pataki spokesman David Catalfamo, a board member of the Committee for the George E. Pataki Leadership and Learning Center.
    Backers hope to raise $500,000 in private funds in the first year, Catalfamo said Thursday. The effort is being headed by Charles Gargano, who was Pataki’s top statewide economic development official.
    Pataki, a Republican, served 12 years as governor before he was succeeded by Democrat Eliot Spitzer in January 2007. Spitzer resigned in the wake of a prostitution scandal last March and was replaced by David Paterson.
    Pataki, 63, was seen as a possible presidential candidate in 2000 and 2008 but has been largely out of the public eye since deciding not to seek the 2008 GOP nomination.
    He joined the law firm Chadbourne & Parke in New York City, and he and his former chief of staff, John Cahill, created an environmental consulting firm based at Chadbourne. Pataki also co-chaired a Council on Foreign Relations task force on climate change with former Iowa Gov. Thomas Vilsack. Catalfamo said the Pataki learning center is scheduled to open this fall in Peekskill, where Pataki grew up and served as mayor. Incorporation papers were filed on July 7, and the center will have to be approved by the state Department of Education. Catalfamo said Pataki hesitated initially but agreed to participate with the understanding that the focus would be on educating children in the fourth through seventh grades about public service. “He was not interested in a memorial-tome kind of thing,” Catalfamo said. While former U.S. presidents have set up libraries and museums for the study of their administrations, former governors generally have not.
    Patrick Kenney, chairman of the political science department at Arizona State University, said there are university-affiliated public policy institutes named for political figures such as the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
    But Kenney said he could not think of a freestanding museum or institute similar to the planned Pataki center.
    Earlier this year, a former Pataki aide agreed to pay a $15,000 fine for violating state ethics laws by seeking state money for a failed women’s museum.
    Evelyn Rollins, a senior adviser to Pataki on women’s issues, was chosen by Pataki to head the proposed Museum of Women in lower Manhattan.
    The state Public Integrity Commission found that Rollins solicited grant money on behalf of the museum from the state Offi ce of Parks and Recreation even though she was then on the state payroll.
    New York ethics law prohibits paid state employees from soliciting state grants. State parks spokeswoman Eileen Larrabee said $2.2 million in grants were approved. Of that, $316,000 was never paid and $170,000 has since been returned.
    Despite the state dollars, a lack of private donations doomed the project.