Any hope that business as usual would change at the Nassau County Legislature in 2016 ended quickly.
On Jan. 4, in a party-line vote, legislators re-elected Norma Gonsalves the presiding officer of the Legislature.
In poker, this is known as a tell.
Because if anybody represents the sad state of the Nassau County Legislature it is Gonsalves.
On Dec. 23, — less than two weeks after Gonsalves was re-elected to lead county lawmakers — the enforcement agency for the state Board of Elections accused Gonsalves of 10 counts of failing to file campaign-finance disclosure reports from 2006 to 2015 and recommended fines of up to $28,000.
Risa Sugarman, the state’s newly appointed elections-law counsel, said Gansalves had failed to report in a timely fashion “on at least 34 occasions,” according to Newsday.
The election board charges are not to be confused with the federal investigation requested by then Acting District Attorney Madeline Singas in October of Gonsalves and two other Republican legislators for taxpayer-funded mailers they sent during their last re-election campaigns that falsely claimed that county legislators did not raise property taxes during the past five years.
It was Singas who reported in July that “troubling problems” in the county contracting process, including no requirements for vendors to disclose subsidiary companies, criminal convictions, political contributions or whether a vendor is barred from government contracts in other places.
According to Singas, her office found an unspecified contractor with ties to organized crime, a contractor barred from doing government business in another jurisdiction and a convicted felon with a bankruptcy.
The report, which is part of an ongoing review Singas began in April after then-state Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos was accused of illegally pressuring the awarding of a Nassau County contract to a company that employed his son, Adam,
Both Skeloses were convicted of the charges in December.
The charges against the Skeloses had nothing to do with the $9.5 million in contracts the Legislature approved from June 2011 to January worth $24,000-$25,000 apiece which were not subject to oversight. Until then, the Legislature only required oversight of contracts of $25,000 or more.
Except for a $200,000 no-bid consulting contract to former Republican state Sen. Michael Balboni, which was approved in August 2013 under a little-known provision of the county charter that allows personal service agreements for outside professional services to be “deemed approved” if the Legislature does not act on them within 45 days.
All this took place under Gonsalves’ watch.
As did the recent county budget negotiations that ended with the Nassau County Interim Finance Authority — which has overseen the finances of one of the wealthiest counties in New York State since 2000 — setting quarterly budget targets.
This followed NIFA finding the budget proposed by Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano to contain $170 million in risky revenue projections — only to have the Legislature reject fees and other measures that increased the risk of the county running a deficit in 2016.
In reward for this effort , the county Legislature then voted unanimously in December to virtually double legislators’ salary — from $39,500 a year to $78,000 a year — effective in two years
We can only hope that the increase in salary attracts some better qualified candidates, who make a change in leadership sorely overdue.
