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Light Drizzle Fog/Mist Thinking ahead to life after Covid
Local stakeholders ask, 'What's next?'
With hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers unemployed, thousands of businesses shuttered and tens of thousands of cases of Covid-19 in Nassau County, each day seems like a universe in itself. In the midst of the chaos of a pandemic on a scale not seen for more than 100 years, though, stakeholders have been asking from the start: When the virus finally passes, what next?
The Herald has been speaking with elected officials, business leaders and representatives of schools and churches over the past month.
Seaford and Wantagh have not been as hard-hit by the coronavirus as neighboring Levittown, which had 419 cases by Sunday night, or East Meadow, which had 453. But with 110 cases in Seaford — and one fatality — and a total of 255 in Wantagh and North Wantagh, the crisis has definitely hit home.
Both are residential communities with mostly small businesses. “Many of those have been able to convert to online businesses,” Wantagh Chamber of Commerce President Cathy McGrory Powell said. “There’s a lot of ingenuity, a lot of creativity in the community. I think we’ll see some interesting things come out of this — like businesses partnering with each other” to speed their recovery.
Out of work
As recently as January, Nassau County had the lowest rate of unemployment in the state. But 23,000 unemployment claims were filed in the week ended April 3, a nearly 40-fold increase over the same week a year ago.
Locally, “food banks, the Army Corps of Engineers — many, many people have stepped up” to fill voids where government agencies lacked material and human resources, said State Sen. John Brooks, a Democrat from Seaford. But the people plugging various gaps in services are finite resources, too.
Food pantries began reporting shortages three weeks ago, as key links in their supply chains had to be quarantined. “One of our drivers who brings fresh meat tested positive, so we won’t have that for a few weeks,” said Yolanda Murray, longtime manager of the Long Island Council of Churches’ food pantry in Freeport — one of the area’s largest, serving all of the South Shore. The pantry receives food from both Island Harvest and Long Island Cares, as well as donations from across the area, including the Wantagh Memorial Congregational Church.
“We’re still able to care for our regular clients,” Elie Melendez, manager of the food pantry at St. Frances de Chantal Catholic Church in Wantagh, said last week. “We’re still getting food deliveries from all our usual donors.”
With jobless levels not seen since the end of World War II, however, demand for services like Melendez’s and Murray’s are likely to increase. To ease some of the strain, the state and county have imposed moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures, and PSEG has ceased issuing shut-off orders for those unable to pay their utility bills. But “when those orders cease in 90 or 120 days, or whenever, what happens the day after that — on Day 91?” when accounts in arrears come due, Levittown Democratic State Sen. Kevin Thomas asked.
No one knows.
That is the basic dilemma from a financial perspective, County Comptroller Jack Schnirman said: “We don’t know how long it will last or how deep the hole will be.” As long as businesses remain closed, one of the county’s principal sources of revenue — sales tax — remains essentially shut off at the tap.
“Sales tax represents about 30 percent of our total revenue,” Schnirman said, and estimated that losses could range “anywhere from $50 million to $180 million, or between 4 and 12.7 percent of projected revenue for 2020.”
And the revenue and expenditure sides of the ledger do not move at the same pace. Expenditures appear much more rapidly, because residents’ needs are immediate, whereas revenue, like sales tax, can take months to make its way into local coffers, “so the modeling is complex,” Schnirman said.
His office has begun putting together a study of the county government’s potential needs, and County Executive Laura Curran formed a Council of Economic Advisors as the extent of the crisis became apparent.
Rockville Centre businessman John Cameron, a member of the council, the chairman of the Long island Regional Planning Council and the chairman of Cameron Engineering, said the county should be planning infrastructure projects now. He conceded that “my perspective may sound self-serving,” but he emphasized that companies like his are wholesale creators of jobs.
Cameron also said that such projects have at least a six-month lead time, from the initial requests for proposals to putting shovels in the ground. And he emphasized that even local problems have global complications. “Ninety percent of the antibiotics we use come from China,” he said. But “less than 5 percent of the goods we need for a recovery are carried in U.S. shipping.” And Chinese shipping is “dead in the water,” he said.
When will schools open?
Uncertainty has also filtered down to schools and their own budget processes. Both the Seaford and Wantagh school districts were well on the way to submitting budgets to their boards for approval when the crisis began. Now, though, they do not know when live classroom instruction will resume, and budget votes have been pushed back until at least June 1.
Because the schools’ fiscal year begins on July 1, “we won’t have time to conduct a second vote” if the first budget proposal fails, Seaford Schools Superintendent Dr. Adele Pecora said. And because New York’s presidential primary has been postponed to the same time frame, “we may be competing for voting machines,” she added.
“We haven’t had any discussions about any changes to the school calendar,” Pecora said. But Brooks, a former Seaford Board of Education trustee, said he was weighing options for the coming year, depending on what researchers learn about the life cycle of the coronavirus.
“If it turns out to be temperature-sensitive, it might make sense to start school during the warmer months, close down during the cold winter months and open up again in spring,” Brooks said.
One of the first measures Brooks, Cameron, Schnirman and Thomas would all like to see is a rollback of the state and local tax cap that was part of President Trump’s 2017 tax package. Brooks has been a vocal opponent of the cap, along with U.S. Rep. Peter King, Republican of Seaford.
The cap costs New Yorkers $15 billion more a year than they get back, according to Brooks. “And they’ve already paid tax on that money,” he said, “so they’re being taxed double.”
King joined Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Democrat from Glen Cove, to introduce a measure in the House in December that would roll back the cap. The bill passed the House, 218-206, and attracted some Republican support, but it has stalled in the Senate.
The real imponderable in all of this is not how long the battle against Covid-19 will last, but where the money for a real recovery will come from. “That’s a great question,” Schnirman allowed before admitting that he had no answer. Nassau County’s 2020 budget was nearly unchanged year over year, with no extras for emergency housing, health care or small business loans. And the state was already looking at a $6 billion shortfall before the crisis, according to Thomas. No one even wanted to guess how much the recovery would cost.
“At least some of the money will probably have to come from the federal government,” Thomas said. But Nassau County has solid credit, especially with provisions in the state’s 2020 budget reinstating the Nassau Interim Finance Authority’s ability to bond, if necessary.
NIFA’s credit rating is three notches higher than the county’s, which would enable the county to borrow at more favorable interest rates. So the question is more likely to be when, not if, the county will borrow — and how much.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo sounded a note of caution at his daily news conference on April 8. With such widespread human and economic devastation, he said, “I don’t think we return to ‘normal.’ I don’t think we go back to yesterday.”
Brooks agreed. “The question is, what have we learned from this? How do we ensure we’re better protected in case there’s a second or a third round?”
