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It was founded by Governor George Pataki and then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. The LMDC is a joint State-City corporation governed by a 16-member Board of Directors, half appointed by the Governor of New York and half by the Mayor of New York. Its original chairman was John C. Whitehead, a former Deputy Secretary of State and head of Goldman Sachs. LMDC does not own the World Trade Center site and this has created problems in its dealings with the owner -- the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and Larry Silverstein who has a lease to the site. It is a subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corporation, which is a state authority which is used to implement various projects in the state that are not subject to Legislature or voter oversight. The L.M.D.C. was funded through the disbursement of Community Development Block Grants-amounting to $2.783 billion-approved by the federal government in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and resultant destruction of much of lower Manhattan's economic and structural base. In February 2003, the LMDC chose Daniel Libeskind's master plan for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center complex. The organization also sponsored the international design competition for the World Trade Center Memorial, which resulted in Michael Arad and Peter Walker's Reflecting Absence being chosen as the winning design in January 2004. Having distributed its funds, the LMDC in July 2006 announced plans to dissolve. It will be transferring its current responsibilities to other existing agencies and foundations, including the W.T.C. Memorial Foundation, and the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center. Stefan Pryor, corporation president, has recently announced that he will be leaving the LMDC this September to become Deputy Mayor of Newark, New Jersey. At times, the LMDC has been the subject of intense public criticism, both because of questions surrounding the proposed September 11th memorial, and what many perceive to be its questionable handling of taxpayer funds. Two members of the LMDC's board have asserted that up to $45 million allocated to the LMDC from a "community enhancement" fund in May of 2005 has not been directly accounted for, and that up to $15 million from that stipend might have been spent in areas other than those it had been explicitly stipulated for. In May of 2006, New York's Attorney General, Elliot Spitzer unequivocally condemned the LMDC as an "abject failure" in its capacity as an agent for rebuilding lower Manhattan. He also attributed the departure of Gretchen Dykstra from a group raising money for the World Trade Center memorial to a process where "there was nobody willing to make decisions."
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