David Greenfield left the New York City Council to run Met Council on January 1, 2018. In the fiscal year that ended June 2025, the Jewish anti-poverty charity paid him $630,294, plus $59,530 in other compensation, according to its latest tax return, filed May 15, 2026.
That is about $690,000 to run a charity that took in $42.9 million that year.
His pay has climbed every year: $390,540 in fiscal 2019, $528,249 in 2021, $597,987 in 2023, $627,955 in 2024. That is a 61% raise in six years.
The rest of the top
Brian Tregerman, chief development officer: $359,995, plus $59,685
Robert Newman, COO: $307,185
Philip Kibel, CFO: $279,823
The public money
Government grants to the Metropolitan New York Coordinating Council on Jewish Poverty went from $5.79 million in fiscal 2023 to $11.13 million in fiscal 2024, a 92% jump, according to Impala's analysis of its filings. Private contributions held flat at about $31.5 million.
The filings don't say which agencies or programs produced the increase. City Council discretionary items, state member items and federal food programs are all possibilities.
Why the history matters
Met Council's former CEO, William Rapfogel, was fired in 2013 and arrested in January 2014 in a scheme involving about $7 million in insurance kickbacks. The city froze pending awards in August 2013. In 2015 the charity hired its first chief compliance officer.
Because of that history, a 2013 oversight agreement required the city's Department of Investigation and the state budget office to sign off on a new CEO. When Greenfield's hire was announced in July 2017, neither had yet approved it, City & State reported. He also announced his move after the petition deadline, which let his own vacancy committee hand his Council seat to Kalman Yeger, a former aide and former Met Council employee. The Daily News criticized the maneuver in an editorial, the Forward reported.
Before the Council, Greenfield was founding director of TEACH NYS, now part of the OU's school-funding lobby, and chief of staff to Assemblyman Dov Hikind.
Met Council feeds a lot of people. The question is not whether it does good work. It is how a charity that once lost the city's trust over money explains its current pay and where its new public dollars come from.
How we reported this: from Met Council's Form 990 data (EIN 13-2738818) on ProPublica and Impala, City & State, the Forward and the Times of Israel. A separate entity, the Met Council Research and Educational Fund, has its own filings and is not included. We will ask Met Council about the grant increase and how its board sets pay. Tips: [email protected].