Sanitation No. 7’s budget balancing act

If you really focus on reducing the expenditure, you find avenues you can shave off.”

John Mannone, Chairman, Sanitation District No. 7

The board of commissioners of Oceanside’s Sanitation District No. 7 is due to vote in two weeks on a final budget for 2018, and its discussions in preparation for the vote have highlighted two competing priorities that could affect taxpayers.

If the district neglects to trim its bottom line, it may have to collect $70,000 in additional taxes. And if it fails to prevent a looming personnel crisis, district Chairman John Mannone said that Oceanside could face “a serious disruption of service” sometime in the coming year.

“We’re running into a situation where we’re going to lose people,” Mannone said, “because they can’t afford to work here anymore.”

Workers in Sanitation No. 7 take home notably less pay than employees of the Town of Hempstead’s regular districts, according to a number of employees and board members. Mannone wrote in an email that solving the problem would require the board to reform what he called “the patronage wage system” — a practice described in a 2014 state audit report as unauthorized deferred-compensation pay of more than $800,000.

A 2015 lawsuit filed by two former district employees alleged that the scheme rewarded other employees who allied with board members politically and in business matters that were unrelated to the district.

“There’s too many people there making money,” former district worker Joseph Samoles, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, said. “And the right guys aren’t.” The suit was dismissed in March 2017 on a technicality.

According to public payroll figures from 2016, employees of Oceanside's Sanitation District No. 7 were paid, on average, nearly $26,000 less than employees of Town of Hempstead employees from several other districts.

The highest paid employee in Oceanside, former Supervisor Antonio Piscopo, who retired in July, was paid almost $6,000 more than the highest paid Town of Hempstead employee with records published online.

Mannone said he hoped to implement a system of fixed wages per title for all employees, which, he said, would redistribute the payroll more fairly and give workers greater incentive to stay on.

Commissioner Ed Scharfberg said that in addition to regular raises written into employee contracts, he would like to see a step program in which employees receive raises based on the amount of time they have worked for the district.

Shop steward Dimitrios Misetzis Jr., who will represent district workers in upcoming contract negotiations, emailed, “I respect [Scharfberg and Mannone] for recognizing our long standing labor issues, and appreciate any and all efforts made by them to secure a better future for the workforce and our families. They are life-long Oceansiders and understand that our families are a part of the community as well … You can find us around town working second jobs, volunteering at the fire department, coaching little league.” Misetzis added that all of the current commissioners promised to look after the workers, and that it appeared to him that they were “making strides” to do so.

The other side of the fiscal equation is the potential for a tax increase. According to a proposed budget presented at an Aug. 2 meeting, the district would require almost $70,000 more in tax revenue than last year.

Mannone said that while such an increase would end up being “negligible per person,” he wanted to do everything he could to avoid it. “We looked at the actual [expenses],” he said. “… If you really focus on reducing the expenditure, you find avenues you can shave off.”

The board would later amend the proposed budget at an Aug. 15 meeting to include a reduction of almost $65,000 in expenditures. Some $42,000 was cut from the proposed allotment for attorney fees, given the “reduction in litigation expenses with the end of the Samoles case,” according to the document.

The board is proposing to save another $15,000 in the allotment for new equipment. Most of the other cuts from the earlier proposal are between $1,000 and $5,000.

Mannone said that this sort of budget scrutiny was new for the board, on which he has sat since 2015. “When I first got on the board,” he recalled, “the treasurer would crunch the numbers and we would accept that assumption.” Speaking of the most recent board meeting, on Aug. 15, he added, “It was good to see the level of intensity that the commissioners brought toward challenging those assumptions.”

Scharfberg said that preventing a tax increase next year is important, but added that the district needs a five- and 10-year financial plan because “We don’t want to float a bond, and we don’t want to raise taxes” going forward.

The district recently put out a request for proposals, seeking bids for an actuary to help develop such a plan, but received no response, according to Scharfberg. It is putting together a second RFP, with a more specific scope.

The board will hold a public meeting on Sept. 5, its final meeting to discuss the budget proposal, which it will put to a vote on Sept. 7. In addition to the budget, the board will also finalize plans for spending its portion of state-awarded “storm resiliency” money.

“We had a lot of public participation,” Mannone said, referring to the Aug. 15 meeting. “I’ve never seen so many people show up for a budget meeting. It was good to see people actually concerned about how the money gets spent.”