Editorial

Nassau needs an independent watchdog

Posted

Nassau County buys a lot of stuff — millions of dollars’ worth of things like police cars and office supplies — and contracts for services from attorneys, consultants and others. The process of procuring all these goods and services should be open and transparent. It should encourage competitive bidding to make sure that the county gets the best price when spending our tax dollars.

The procurement system should not be a vehicle to reward political allies and campaign donors. Unfortunately, Nassau’s archaic paper-based system makes public scrutiny of these contracts all but impossible. It has led to documented cases of abuse and thwarted competitive bidding, and eroded the public’s confidence in government.

For proof, look no further than the AbTech scandal that brought down State Sen. Dean Skelos. The senator’s son, Adam, was hired by AbTech, and the county issued a request for proposals for a storm-water management project that was tailor-made to a $12 million project that AbTech had pitched. The Skeloses then pressured the county to adopt the proposal. This all came to a halt when U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara indicted Dean and Adam Skelos for corruption.

The current procurement system is full of ways for contractors to avoid disclosure of political connections and prior wrongdoing. County law stipulates that contracts for more than $25,000 must be approved by the Legislature. However, as documented by Newsday, of the 4,435 contracts issued by the county from 2011 to last July, 384 were for amounts between $24,000 and $25,000 — 9 percent of all contracts. In contrast, only 20 were for amounts between $25,000 and $26,000. Clearly, the goal was to evade legislative scrutiny.

Many of those 384 contracts were awarded without competitive bidding, deemed to require “skills that cannot be evaluated through a competitive bid process.” Sixty percent of these contracts were awarded to vendors that had made at least one campaign contribution to County Executive Edward Mangano, according to Newsday. Others went to firms that had former public officials on the payroll.

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