Democratic Nassau County legislators on Wednesday proposed a cap on county fee increases in what they called an effort to “rein in” County Executive Edward Mangano’s overtaxing of residents.
In advance of the Legislature’s first budget hearing Wednesday, the six Democrats filed a bill that would apply the state’s 2 percent cap on property tax hikes to fee increases, casting Mangano’s proposed $83 million in revenue from new and increased fees as equivalent to a 9.4 percent property tax increase.
“We need to be able to take the county executive and rein him in,” Minority Leader Kevan Abrahams (D-Hempstead) said at a news conference in Mineola. “He is driving up costs of being a Nassau County homeowner.”
The budget Mangano, a Republican, proposed last month keeps county property taxes flat but creates a dozen new fees and raises more than 100 existing fees to collect about $82.5 million in new revenue.
More than three-quarters of that, about $64.4 million, would come from a $105 “public safety fee” added to traffic and parking tickets, which Mangano says will go toward hiring 150 new police officers.
Under the Democrats’ bill, fee increases would be capped at 2 percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower, and no fee could be raised more than once every two years.
Democratic legislators said new business licensing fees and hikes to fees for park use and alarm system permits are Mangano’s way of circumventing the property tax cap by “nickel-and-diming residents,” Abrahams said.
Mangano’s administration says the fees would make specific people, including drivers who break traffic laws, shoulder the county’s increased costs while a property tax hike would affect all residents.
“Residents should be outraged that Democrats increased property taxes by 42 percent and consistently oppose Ed Mangano’s budgets which remained under the tax cap and froze property taxes for six years,” Brian Nevin, a Mangano spokesman and aide, said in an email Wednesday.
Democrats approved large tax hikes in the early 2000s to save the county from bankruptcy. The 2015 county budget contained a 3.4 percent property tax hike that county officials said was negated by a state tax rebate for most homeowners. Mangano proposed a 1.2 percent increase last year that the Republican-controlled Legislature struck by overriding Mangano’s veto.
Legislators will hold three hearings before the Oct. 31 deadline to approve a budget. The adopted budget is subject to approval by the Nassau Interim Finance Authority, the state oversight board installed in 2000 that currently controls the county’s finances.
Democrats want an independent inspector general to oversee county contracts and root out “waste, fraud and abuse,” Abrahams said. But Republicans have rejected that idea, saying the county already has officials who fulfill its role.
Abrahams did not give specifics when asked what new revenue or spending cuts his party would propose in the short term, but said Democrats would put forward plans after the budget hearings.
Legislator Carrie Solages (D-Elmont) said the county could increase park fees for nonresidents and sell unused land. Nevin said those ideas “wouldn’t come close” to covering some $57 million in salary increases required by labor agreements with county workers that both parties approved.
