Seven thousand Nassau County employees have been working without a contract for three years.
Guess what? Our county executive, Ed Mangano, the county Legislature and the unions have finally come up with an agreement.
I’ll give you one guess who was missing at the bargaining table. It’s the taxpayers of course.
You won’t believe how they want us to pay for it. They are going to install speed-cameras in school zones to catch all of our hardened criminals racing through those traffic lights.
Do you want me to repeat that? Are 56 cameras enough to pay for the contract? Who knows?
How much revenue will they produce six months from now, after we all learn which intersections to avoid?
How much does it cost to install and maintain these cameras? Of course, these cost are not available yet ! To make matters even more outlandish, they assume that sales-tax collections as well as mortgage fees will both be increasing. In this economy?
Have they lost their collective minds? This contract can cost us up to $292 million dollars and all they want to do is photograph us and hope we generate more sales tax at the Americana Shopping Center.
Let’s face it. Our politicians don’t care because in 10 years many will be collecting their own pensions while we are still paying for these outlandish agreements.
Did you ever hear of George Marlin?
He is the brilliant outgoing NIFA board member, who until a month ago, was overseeing all of this nonsense. He refused to go along with these ridiculous onetime solutions.
I guess that’s why he is an “outgoing” board member.
Now, Jon Kaiman, a Democrat no-less, is seeing through this insanity.
Just in case you missed it, Moody just downgraded Suffolk County’s credit rating because they too, were adopting these same overtly optimistic, one-time budgetary gimmicks.
So, let’s recheck their numbers:
1 – You could hear them cheering all the way to Jones Beach when they announced that Nassau County’s unemployment rate was lowered to 5.9 percent from last year’s 7.7 percent. But, not so fast. Not included in this figure are those who are working part time, as well as those who have entirely given up looking for a job. Include these two groups in their numbers and the real unemployment rate is a staggering 10 percent!
2 – 30,000 Long Islanders are presently receiving unemployment benefits!
Did you hear that? 30,000 ! That’s more than the entire population of Great Neck (10,006), Port Washington (15,843) and Williston Park (3,300) combined !
Do you think that your out-of-work neighbors will be spending more this year to increase our sales tax revenues? I doubt it !
3 – The number of new home closings fell by 12 percent in Nassau County and 5 percent in Suffolk! There goes the anticipated revenue increase from mortgage fees.
4 – Guess what? Their plan is in trouble before they even got started. Nassau County’s sales tax revenues dropped by 14.8 percent for the first three months of this year. This is the largest drop in revenue since the economic collapse of 2008. Tell that to the unions.
5 – And finally, please don’t tell me this slowdown is due to the weather. Aren’t there fewer speeding cars in bad weather as well.
So, let hope these officials go back to the drawing board and come up with some legitimate ideas to pay our workers. Maybe we should be happy that the bargaining committee didn’t suggest:
1 – borrowing the money and adding to our debt with a $292 million dollar bond issue.
2 – a toll booth on Northern Boulevard or
3 – a Nassau County income tax!
Dr. Stephen Morris
North Hills
