Judge says county sex offender law ‘must yield’ to state policies

The Nassau County Department of Social Services once housed homeless families and sex offenders at the Long Beach Motor Inn, on Austin Boulevard in Island Park, but a law governing sex offenders passed by Nassau County changed that. The law, passed in 2006, prevented sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school, and both the Little Village Nursery School and the Lincoln Orens Middle School are within 1,000 feet of the motel.

Now the New York State Court of Appeals has struck down the county law, ruling on Feb. 17 that the county cannot impose its own restrictions on where lower-level sex offenders live, because New York state already has a comprehensive sex offender policy.

The Island Park Civic Association has been at the forefront of efforts to get the Long Beach Motor Inn closed and turned over to the county for use as senior housing for almost eight years. “We need to appeal to the state and urge them to adopt the county laws, at the very least,” said the group’s vice president, Felicia Nicholas. “We need to tap into Assemblyman [Todd] Kaminsky, Senator [Dean] Skelos and Governor Cuomo, to understand the importance of keeping these laws in effect and the safety of our children a priority.”

“A local government’s police power is not absolute,” Judge Eugene Pigott Jr. wrote for the court. “When the state has created a comprehensive and detailed regulatory scheme with regard to the subject matter that the local law attempts to regulate, the local interest must yield to that of the state in regulating that field.”

County Executive Ed Mangano and Norman Gonzales, the presiding officer of the County Legislature, wrote to Cuomo on Feb. 20, asking that state law be amended to include the provisions of the county law. “What is missing from the New York State laws are the critical restrictions on persons designated as level one and level two offenders,” they wrote. “While such persons by definition are considered low or moderate risk to reoffend, the risk to reoffend still exists.”

The letter explained that the local law is more comprehensive than current state law because it applies to all registered sex offenders, and has been enforced since 2006.