Speaking to the Kiwanis Club, Nassau County Comptroller George Maragos admitted what has been clear to anyone without a political agenda: the Nassau County budget is a mess and only getting worse.
The comptroller called for a top-down review of county finances.
“We have a $90 million deficit this year,” he said, adding that he wants to see “financial experts” review the county’s operations in an effort to reduce the deficit.
That’s exactly what Nassau Interim Finance Authority should have been calling for. The authority was created by the state Legislature to keep the county from financial disaster. NIFA has defaulted on that responsibility.
That wasn’t always the case. In February 2013 then NIFA director George Marlin said the county was engaging in “financial gimmicks” to back its false claim that the county is running a budget surplus.
Maragos, a Republican, responded that Marlin, a registered Conservative, was driven by political motivations. Maragos wrote in an Op Ed piece, “I am shocked that Mr. George Marlin, a self-described financial expert, who is in a position of public trust on the NIFA Board, a New York State Agency, has apparently attempted to misinform the public with seemingly incorrect statements and selective out-of-context figures.”
Fast forward to last week when Maragos said, “We need to see how we’re spending money and where we’re spending it. We need management experts to reorganize the county to act much more cost effectively.”
Why wasn’t NIFA, now under the leadership of its new Chair Jon Kaiman, the first to sound an alarm and insist that the county take emergency measures to balance its budget?
NIFA has become a toothless tiger.
Maragos conceded in his speech last week that the school zone speed cameras, a gimmick that was intended to raise millions of dollars for the county under the guise of protecting children, has been a disaster.
The cameras are not generating the revenue that the county expected and, in just a few months, they have generated a great deal of public anger.
“My guess is that political pressure is building and they’ll do away with the cameras in the future,” he said.
The comptroller suggested that the county might balance the budget by collecting taxes for sales on the internet. Speaking for the thousands of Islanders who shop online (and borrowing from Charlton Heston), “You can tax the internet, Mr. Maragos, when you pry the mouse from our cold, dead hands.”
This idea is as dumb and annoying as the speed cameras and far more tempting.
There are a thousand reasons why it will not work. A sales tax or any tax on the internet would involve crossing state lines and national borders. It would hurt a growing, health commerce and should be rejected before anyone takes it seriously.
Even if it were a good idea, and it is not, enforcing such a tax would be nearly impossible.
We don’t pretend that budget challenges facing the county are easy to solve. We agree with the comptroller that increasing property taxes would be an unpopular solution.
“We know we can’t tax people much more,” he said, “they are at their limit.”
At the same the county should resist new, unreliable gimmicks, like the speed cameras and taxing the internet. The focus should be on reducing spending without the layoffs that it might be forced into making if no other solution is found to balance the budget.
Maragos has put his cards on the table. It’s time for NIFA to stand up and say what’s at risk if the budget deficit is not addressed..
