Laura Curran

What the heck is going on?

Posted

That’s what I muttered as I fetched Newsday from my lawn last Friday and looked at the front page. Amid cross-fire accusations of corruption, criminal behavior and personal vendettas, Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone had demanded that that county’s district attorney, Thomas Spota, resign.

Coverage of that story had to compete for space with the news of former Senate Leader Dean Skelos’s five-year prison sentence in his family-drama corruption case — days after the other most powerful man in New York, former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, was sentenced to 12 years for his own criminal misuse of power.

As a regular-citizen-turned-elected-official, I had to ask myself, what on earth have I gotten myself into? (And, as a former newspaper reporter, I couldn’t help but think, wow, these stories are juicy.)

The bitterly personal acrimony coming to light in Suffolk makes our home turf, Nassau County, look like Mayberry — at least this week. But we have a problem simmering in Nassau as well. Because of lack of trust in the county’s contracting process, Democrats in the Legislature (of which I am one) are reluctant to borrow money for capital projects.

In fact, I hear many friends, neighbors and constituents say they’ve lost trust in their government, or worse, don’t even feel that it is their government.

This lack of trust plagues not just Long Islanders, of course. Exhibit A on the national stage is the unprecedented and unforeseen success of insurgent candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, proof that Americans of both parties are fed up with being condescended to and taken for granted by establishment politicians.

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