By Steve Levy
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman declared loudly at a recent meeting with the Nassau Interim Finance Authority that the county should no longer be under the auspices of a financial control board.
He has a point.
It has now been over 25 years since one of the wealthiest counties in the nation was placed under financial review from Albany. They weren’t the first, and they won’t be the last, but it may be one of the longest periods for a county to remain under the control of such a board.
Unlike Suffolk and many of its towns, which have raised taxes over the last several years, Nassau County has not hiked taxes in four years. It is also running a surplus, in large part because of hundreds of millions of dollars that were granted to the county from the federal government in the aftermath of the pandemic.
There seems little justification to keep a control board over the county unless it’s political in nature, in which the state — which is run by Democratic officials, including Blakeman’s opponent, Governor Kathy Hochul — simply wants to maintain leverage over the Republican-controlled county.
What’s incredibly ironic is that, while the state has continued to force Nassau to have its finances under the microscope and requires approval for many of its actions from the Democrat-controlled state board, there is no such financial control board for the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which is always teetering on the brink of fiscal collapse.
This column has long been calling for our state leaders to declare the MTA insolvent and impose a financial control board, which would have the authority to cut spending, as well as tear up its present contracts with its ridiculously onerous provisions that have allowed for outlandish work rules and unsustainable overtime, salaries, and pensions.
Each year, we read about a new deficit facing the MTA and, each year, they explore yet another fare or tax increase, the last being congestion pricing, which was supposed to stabilize the authority. We warned back then that giving more money to this beast will not satisfy it.
The MTA’s problem is not a lack of revenue; it is uncontrolled spending. We knew that, as soon as the money from congestion pricing was implemented, the state would fold in contract negotiations and give another unsustainable raise. That is now being blamed for yet the latest deficit and the need for more money from taxpayers and commuters.
Enough is enough.
The state should stop obsessing over Nassau County and instead focus its attention on the runway train at the MTA and finally place it under a financial control board.