Words grow heated in county exec race

In what is becoming an increasingly bitter, partisan battle, Nassau County Legislator Ed Mangano, a Republican, is challenging incumbent Democrat Thomas Suozzi for the county executive’s seat.

The race appears to boil down to three key issues: property taxes, a recently imposed 2.5 percent energy tax and the county’s troubled property-tax assessment system.

Mangano is challenging Suozzi’s handling of all three issues, while Suozzi fires back that the county has consistently balanced its budget while improving its bond rating, which reduces the interest the county must pay when it bonds money for any number of projects.

Tax assessments

Mangano, an attorney and a former college dean and newspaper publisher, says he sees Nassau’s high property taxes as a function of the county’s mishandling of the assessment system. Each year, property values, on which county taxes are based, are re-evaluated by the county using computer modeling. The county pays out roughly $100 million annually in tax certiorari cases in which home or business owners challenge their assessments before the Nassau County Assessment Review Commission. In recent years, Mangano said, the county has had to bond money in order to pay off the challenges, indebting future generations of residents.

The key to lowering property taxes and reducing debt, Mangano said, is to fix the assessment system so that the county is no longer paying out millions in challenges. The system, he said, “is crushing us.”

Mangano said he would like to freeze the assessment rolls for one to five years in order to implement corrected rolls before new ones are released. Currently, he said, new rolls are released before corrected ones, so corrected rolls never take effect.

Meanwhile, Suozzi, an attorney and accountant, said he lobbied to replace the elected tax assessor with an appointed assessor in order to ensure that a competent, highly trained professional is in place. In 2008, Nassau residents voted to do away with the elected assessor -- who was previously an assistant district attorney. Suozzi appointed his first assessor, Thaddeus Jankowski, this year.