Nassau’s social-service network in crisis

The Bellmore-based Long Island Crisis Center would lose more than $300,000 in funding if Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano were to carry out a plan to cut all contracts with nonprofit social-service agencies that work with troubled youth, the mentally ill and drug addicts, said Linda Leonard, the Crisis Center’s executive director, last week.

The cut, which is to take effect in early July, could force the Crisis Center to close its 24-hour, seven-day-a-week suicide and runaway hotline –– the county’s only such hotline, Leonard said.

Freeport Pride, which counsels teenagers who have broken the law and would be in jail without the agency, would lose $350,000, which would force it to reduce staff and services. As a result, a greater number of youth offenders could be locked up rather than in a vocational education program, said Ted Levy, the agency’s executive director.

And the Peninsula Counseling Center, a drug-treatment agency with offices in Valley Stream and Hewlett, would lose $137,000 and would have to cut staff, leaving hundreds of adolescents and adults without addiction counseling, said John Kastan, the agency’s executive director.

On Thursday, Mangano sent letters by certified mail to the 43 private youth and the 15 mental-health and addiction-treatment agencies that annually receive county contracts for services, informing them that their funding would be eliminated in less than a month –– unless, Mangano said, they could persuade three Democratic lawmakers to side with the Legislature’s 10 Republicans to approve a measure to borrow $41 million to pay the county’s tax-certiorari debts. A certiorari is a challenge to a property’s assessment. The Legislature is to vote on the plan une 18.