Be prepared for Nassau and Suffolk Counties to present budgets this month for 2024 that freeze or cut county taxes.
That’s the least they should do, given the fact that they’re sitting on record surpluses due to a mind-boggling amount of money that was handed to them by the federal government during the pandemic. Each county got hundreds of millions of dollars while only dribs and drabs had to be spent on Covid. The rest is sitting in various contingencies and reserves.
This is the easiest year in decades for the counties to present budgets with tax decreases. The key line to look at, however, is the spending column. Taxpayer watchdogs must look closely as to whether the counties use the Covid money as an excuse to spend like drunken sailors.
The problem is that these Covid grants were one-shots and are not going to be repeated. If the counties spend this money on recurring expenses, such as more personnel and higher salaries and perks, it will spell economic hardship in short order when those bills have to be paid. Suffolk is awash in over $700 million in reserves. The county garnered over $500 million in outright grants from the feds, along with hundreds of millions in extra dollars that came into the coffers due to an economy on steroids because of the feds pumping money into the economy. Suffolk had over $1 billion in unanticipated revenue to play with.
Hopefully, the county will designate as much money within those funds as possible to construct new sewers. They should use that money, in lieu of their wrongheaded suggestion that we raise the sales tax once again. The one-shot revenue from the feds should be used on one-shot expenditures, such as sewers and not on more personnel, salaries and projects that are recurring year over year.
The unions, and many of the big-spending politicians, want those surpluses spent on salaries and perks, and then hit the taxpayers with a sales tax increase to pay for the sewers. That’s bad politics and bad policy.
Nassau County should use these funds to pay down its enormous debt so it could finally get out from under the oversight of a control board.
That’s the proper use of these funds. Let’s see what they do.