Our Views: Paying to end the wage freeze

The Island Now

Will the real Jon Kaiman please stand up.

Last week Kaiman, the chair of the Nassau Interim Finance Authority, said Nassau County’s finances are “structurally imbalanced” and the county needs to reform its tax assessment system to get out of debt.

Speaking at a Great Neck Chamber of Commerce meeting, he said, “We are one of the wealthiest counties in America, in the world, and yet we are in a situation where our finances aren’t working.”

We agree.

A week before that, asked if the county could afford an agreement that will end the wage freeze for 7,000 county workers, Kaiman replied, “We think it saves hundreds of millions of dollars and it also gets the public employees the confidence that they are going to get step increase and wage increases regularly.”

A report released last week by the NIFA appears to challenge that assumption. It claims that the county is overly “optimistic” about the revenue resources that will pay for the new labor contracts. 

“Unfortunately,” the report concludes, “the revenues and saving offsets are optimistic and the additional cost will require the county to address a stagnant revenue base.”

The 34-page report questions whether the new contracts can be paid for in large part by revenue from the installation of speed cameras in 56 school districts and the hiring of civilians to do the work now done by uniformed law enforcement.

In other words, NIFA, the authority that Kaiman heads, has concluded that the deal that Kaiman championed may very well leave the county’s finances “structurally imbalanced.”

According to Nassa uCounty Executive Edward Mangano, the county will raise $25 million to $72 million from the speed cameras based on its projection that the cameras will generate 200 violations per day for 180 school days each year with a $50 fine and a $30 administrative fee. The NIFA report estimates the revenue from the cameras will be much lower.

Are we the only ones troubled by the prospect that the contracts of county employees will be paid for by what amounts to a speed trap? This isn’t Mayberry RFD. The only reason for a stop sign, red light or traffic camera of any kind should be public safety.

And what about that $30 administrative fee? If the fee doesn’t reflect real administrative costs, then the fee is just a thinly disguised part of the fine. Then call it what it is. If there are administrative costs even close to $30, then the $30 is not additional revenue.

Once again Mangano is attempting to balance the county budget with the use of a gimmick and Kaiman is buying into it. Kaiman needs to take a lesson from his predecessor at NIFA, George Marlin, who strongly opposed the use of gimmicks to balance the budget even when it didn’t buy him any popular points with Mangano, his party or the unions.

Responding to news of the agreement to lift the wage freeze, Marlin said he estimated that the cost would be much higher than Mangano estimates. “The means to pay for these deals? Nobody’s yet sure – they’re taking the county’s word for it now.”

The oversight of NIFA was invoked by law to keep the county from falling over a fiscal cliff. Its report on lifting the wage freeze should be taken very seriously and studied before the new contracts are approved.

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