Plaque Bearing Name of Previous Owner Taken off Wall
By Hank Russell
To watch the video, click here.
They say that everything old is new again. An example is the new owner of the H. Lee Dennison Building, who previously owned the structure.
Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone held a press conference inside the building on December 13 to announce that the county finished its lease buyback program, making its last payment to the Judicial Financial Agency. Even more importantly, the county paid off its obligations 10 years early.
“It’s been a long road,” said, Bellone, who is being term-limited out at the end of the year. “Most importantly, it was a bipartisan effort,” he added, as he was joined by the Suffolk Legislature’s Majority Leader Kevin McCaffrey (R-Lindenhurst) and Legislative Minority Leader Jason Richberg (D-Wyandanch).
When he assumed office in 2012, Bellone said, the county was in a $500 million deficit and a $200 million budget hole. “We needed to implement corrective action. We had to stop the hole from getting deeper.”
He said it would have been easy to pierce the tax cap to address the budget shortfall, but he didn’t want to do that. “It would’ve made matters worse,” he said. “I said that this would not solve the problem. … I am proud to say that we were able to solve this financial problem while keeping our taxes [low].”
To help the county reduce the deficit, he said he sought solutions to reduce the size of government. That included cutting his salary, paying into his healthcare plan and one-shot revenues. That meant selling the Dennison Building. “All this showed how bad this was in the county,” he said. “Things were so bad that we had to sell the building.”
Bellone also said that, before selling the building, they needed to get permission from the state, which he said was “unorthodox.” In 2013, the Judicial Facilities Agency (JFA) bought the building from the county for $70 million. Approximately two years after the purchase, the JFA installed a plaque on the building wall announcing that it was the new proprietor.
The county began making payments to the JFA in 2014 and was scheduled to pay off the lease by 2033. Bellone announced that the county finally paid off the debt — a full 10 years ahead of schedule.
“It’s the perfect example of how far we have come as a government in eliminating the financial disaster,” Bellone said.
To officially declare that Suffolk now owns the building, Bellone ripped up the lease and presented the plaque bearing the JFA’s name to Gershow Recycling, which will recycle the plaque for scrap metal.
“When we had this big piece of metal, that needed to be taken away and handled appropriately, Gershow Recycling came to mind immediately,” he said.
All monies received from the plaque will go into the county’s reserve fund, according to Bellone.
“The fact that we were here now was a team effort,” Richberg said. “A civil service effort, a whole team effort to get us to a better standing.”
McCaffrey said that everything “came together in a good way” because Suffolk now has a surplus. “[We] not only [can] pay off our obligations, but we now have a rainy day fund. In the past, we never even had a cloudy day fund.”