The elephant is still in the room no matter how often Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano and his crew pretend it isn’t there.
At a recent budget hearing, Mangano was slammed for proposing a $2.79 billion budget for 2014 that does not take into account salary increases should the wage freezes for county employees be struck down by the courts.
Painting a rosy picture, Deputy County Executive for Finance Tim Sullivan said the budget, which cuts spending, marks the fourth straight year without a property tax increase.
While that is welcome news, the Mangano administration has to address the question: what will happen if a judge orders the county to give pay raises and, worse yet, at least from a budget point of view, to pay retroactive salary increases. We have not seen an accounting of how much that could cost or how it would be paid for.
Should that happen, the budget for Fiscal Year 2014 is a long way from balanced.
