By:Scott Brinton
Wall Street financier Bruce Bent speaks with the authority and bravado of a man running for county executive, but he lacks the seasoned polish. And that's exactly the image he is seeking to project to Nassau's disaffected voters, who will go to the polls Tuesday, Nov. 6.
Bent, 64, of Plandome, readily admits he's never held elected office. The Conservative-Republican, though, argues that Nassau doesn't need a career politician for its highest office. With deficits soaring past $300 million in recent years, the county could use a money manager, and therein lies his expertise, he says.
Students of high finance know the name Bruce Bent, even if Nassau's larger population does not. He's been named to the Money magazine Hall of Fame. His face has graced the cover of Barron's newspaper.
In 1968, he started his own financial-analysis firm with partner Henry Brown. Bent went on to found the first money-market fund. He started with $300,000 in assets. In 1973, the fund exploded, and soon Bent was managing $500 million. As chairman/CEO of The Reserve Funds, he today oversees 27 funds with $13 billion in assets, and money-market accounts represent a $2-trillion industry.
Bent believes he knows how to save and make money. And that's the sort of executive Nassau needs to return its finances to solvency, he says.
"This is not the time for politics," Bent said in a recent interview with the Herald. Nassau County is "on the verge of bankruptcy."
Bent sees the county as a "$2-billion corporation" whose accounting could use heavy-duty overhauling, and he views the county executive as CEO of the company. As such, his primary responsibilities would lie in restructuring county finances and restoring vigor to its work force, which he called demoralized.
Bent quickly attacked Tom Suozzi, his Democratic opponent, saying that Suozzi's experience as mayor of Glen Cove, a North Shore city with about 26,000 residents and a $30-million budget, is inadequate to manage Nassau's $2-billion budget.
As head of a multi-billion-dollar company, Bent believes he has the needed fiduciary experience to lead the county.
Suozzi, though, counters that when he took office in Glen Cove, the city's finances were in shambles, as are Nassau's. Suozzi says he cut political-patronage jobs and, as an attorney/accountant, balanced Glen Cove's budget while revitalizing the city's dilapidated waterfront and cleaning up its harbor, which suffered from toxic-waste contamination. Such achievements, Suozzi believes, constitute a model of leadership that he would bring to the county level.
Suozzi, 39, defeated state Assemblyman Tom DiNapoli in the Democratic primary Sept. 25. In challenging DiNapoli, he ran as a political maverick, challenging Nassau's former Democratic Party chairman, who had received endorsements from a host of powerful politicos.
Bent sees himself as a political outsider who's willing to stare down even the Republican Party's most-sacred institutions, such as the police department. Bent says openly that the county's police officers, with an average annual salary of $106,000, are overpaid. He knows he can't undo the current officers' contracts. However, he would be tougher in future salary negotiations, he says. "Can I hire an experienced patrolman and pay him less than $106,000 a year? The answer is yes," Bent said.
He noted that New York City police officers are paid an average of $69,000 for a more dangerous job. "It makes no sense," Bent said, referring to a Nassau officer's average wage. "To me, everything should be at fair market," meaning county officers' salaries should roughly equate to those in surrounding municipalities like the city.
He also sees fringe benefits for county workers as "insane." He believes county workers should contribute toward their medical-insurance premiums, which they don't.
Future contract talks could get heated, if the recent protracted negotiations over county correction officers' salaries and benefits are any indication. "Do I think the unions will be realistic?" Bent said. "I think they will."
Bent sees reassessment of the county's tax rolls, which Republicans had for years fought, as a good thing. Interesting, Democrats had made reassessment a cornerstone of their 1999 campaign platform, and when they won a legislative majority that year, they quickly pushed for reassessment of Nassau's 415,000 commercial and residential properties. The task is to be complete by 2003.
The county, though, must look beyond 2003, Bent says. He doesn't believe reassessment will eliminate tax certiorari, in which people challenge their assessments. "That's wishful thinking," he said.
Bent believes Nassau must no longer pay the entire bill when a property owner wins an assessment challenge. School districts and towns must as well.
Bent also wants to revamp the county Attorney's Office, which he says suffers from high turnover. Once, the office was seen as a career track for many aspiring lawyers, but no longer, he said. The trouble is that the county has relied too heavily on outside law firms to do work of the Attorney's Office - at $225 an hour, said Bent.
The office needs "competent leadership," and attorneys there must be well paid, Bent said.
He also sees opportunities for improvement at the county Clerk's Office. He noted that Nassau could make money with an Internet site that allowed people to conduct property title searches.
Additionally, Bent says the county must be fully computerized, which it's not. Computerization, he says, creates efficiency. He tells a story about a tour he took of the Tax Assessment Review Office. He spotted a typewriter on a desk. He rushed out and returned with his granddaughter to show her what a typewriter looks like. He then attended a community meeting, relayed that story to attendees and was told that a typewriter was needed to fill out forms. He rebutted that a computer template could serve the same function as the typewriter, only faster.
As for the parks, once Nassau's pride but which have fallen into disrepair in recent years, Bent said, "I'm very much in favor of not only maintaining but upgrading the parks we have."
He noted that the parks could become better revenue sources for the county. In Suffolk, he said, there's a county golf course where Professional Golfers' Association tournaments are played. Golfers pay a higher price to tee off at the PGA-quality course. Such a premium course for Nassau could help subsidize other areas of the parks, like the playgrounds, said Bent.
He also said there hasn't been "good control of cash receipts" in the parks, nor has there been effective marketing. Do people know where the county parks are? Do people know there's a senior-citizen discount during the week, he wondered.
Bent believes the county should sell the aging Nassau County Veterans Memorial Coliseum to a private company that will refurbish it. The county, he said, "should never have been in the business" of maintaining the coliseum. Nor should it "have been in the hospital business," he said, referring to the insolvent Nassau County Medical Center, which was spun off recently as a public-benefit corporation and had the word County removed from its name, replaced by University.
Bent sees affordable housing as a tricky issue. Providing housing for some and not others leads to hard feelings among residents, he said. He added that affordable housing subsidizes business owners. Once they know their employees receive such housing, they no longer feel obliged to pay higher wages, he said.
Bent has been criticized for maintaining a low-profile, even invisible campaign to date, especially given that a high-visibility primary provided name recognition across the county for his opponent, Suozzi.
In reply, Bent said, "Oddly enough, the primary did not have as much effect on visibility that one would expect." He noted, though, that he planned to start campaigning in earnest last week, with direct mailings, TV commercials and neighborhood walks.
In sum, Bent said, "I'm decisive. I can make decisions. Sometimes, they're wrong, but so far, they've been pretty good."
