Stop using the needy as pawns

Politics ain’t beanbag, the old saying goes. To get what they want, politicians make quid pro quo agreements and try to force deals all the time, all in the name of accomplishing what they think is best for their constituency. We get that.

But there is a line — in this case a bright one, we think — between hardball politics and the Hunger Games, in which the young are made to fight to survive.

County Executive Edward Mangano is telling 43 private, not-for-profit youth centers and 15 mental-health and addiction-treatment facilities that their county funding will end unless they contact their Democratic legislators and plead with them to support Mangano’s demand that he be allowed to borrow $41 million to pay tax refunds owed to commercial property owners.

The Legislature is scheduled to vote on the borrowing plan next Monday.

Democratic Minority Leader Kevan Abrahams, of Hempstead, said his caucus would approve no bonding unless Republicans agreed to a redistricting plan that could determine the outcome of legislative elections for the next decade and beyond. Democrats have charged that the redistricting map proposed by Republicans in 2011 would gerrymander Democrats out of at least two seats in the Legislature and ensure Republican control of it.

The county executive and the majority Republicans in the Legislature have diverted red-light camera fines — previously earmarked as a dedicated funding stream for social services — to the general fund. They want to borrow tens of millions of dollars to pay tax refunds, and are using the most vulnerable citizens as their agents to get what they want.

Just one such agency, the Bellmore-based Long Island Crisis Center, would lose all of the funding for its 24/7 crisis hotline, the only such round-the-clock help line in the county. By threatening to kill the center’s $300,000 contract, the county imperils county youth. Voiding other social service contracts would eliminate or vastly reduce help for troubled youth, those addicted to drugs or alcohol and the mentally ill.

The social service agencies and their clients don’t deserve to be caught in the crossfire of partisan sniping between the GOP and the Democrats.