By Scott Brinton
To help close a $150 million budget gap, County Executive Thomas Suozzi had slashed $4.5 million in funding for the county's Youth Board, which contracts with nonprofit agencies to provide social services for young people. The cut was to take place March 31. Many agencies said they would be forced to close. On March 6, however, Suozzi announced that he would hold off on eliminating funding for the agencies until May 1.
Suozzi has said that he would continue funding the agencies if he were able to get three "revenue enhancers," which would provide $30 million to $38 million for the county. They include a surcharge on traffic and parking tickets, cameras to photograph motorists who speed through red lights in order to ticket them, and a cigarette tax. All three require approval by the state Legislature and Gov. David Paterson.
Last Wednesday, a contingent of county legislators went to Albany to lobby for the three enhancers. They included Presiding Officer Diane Yatauro, a Democrat from Glen Cove, Democratic legislators Roger Corbin, David Denenberg and Wayne Wink, and Republican Denise Ford.
Denenberg said that the legislators met with state lawmakers, including Sen. Craig Johnson and Assemblywoman Earlene Hooper, as well as Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith and briefly with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Speaker, both Democrats.
Subhed: Promises in writing
According to Denenberg, the legislators received written assurances that the state Legislature would pass at least two of the three revenue enhancers, the surcharge on traffic and parking tickets and the cigarette tax. Assemblyman David Gantt, a Democrat from Rochester who heads the Assembly Transportation Committee, opposed stoplight cameras, effectively killing the measure.
Denenberg, however, said he believes the two enhancers that are expected to pass should be enough to save the more than 40 nonprofit social-service agencies that the county contracts with. He noted that the cigarette tax alone is projected to bring in $20 million. The surcharge on traffic and parking tickets is expected to amount to $4 million.
At the same time, the county is cutting $1.2 million in aid to villages. It passed a tax on home heating fuel, which will bring in $18 million. And it is renegotiating union contracts, which should save $50 million annually.
"We're trying to act as prudently as possible," Denenberg said. "It's prudent to get ahead of the financial cuts and make the necessary cuts."
Social-service agencies "are essential to provide proper community support, whether it's the Long Island Crisis Center or any of the drug and alcohol programs," Denenberg continued. "I spend my time working with the community-based programs, because these programs can actually have an effect."
If the state Legislature does pass the two enhancers, Suozzi has said he would pump that money back into social services, throwing them a desperately needed lifeline.
In February, the county notified as many as 20 agencies that they would lose all of their county funding at the end of March. The others would have their contracts reduced by 50 to 75 percent. The Long Island Crisis Center, Nassau's only 24-hour, seven-day-a-week suicide-prevention hotline, was told that it would lose 67 percent of its county funding. Tempo Group, which provides drug treatment and education for hundreds of students in the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District, was told that it could have $150,000 in county funding cut, which would mean that it would have to eliminate services for Central students.
Despite the temporary reprieve -- and a promise by the Legislature to pass the two revenue enhancers by the end of April -- Linda Leonard, the Crisis Center's executive director, remains concerned. She said that a number of social-service agencies have already laid off staff in anticipation of losing funding on March 31. With uncertainty looming over whether the enhancers will, in fact, pass the Legislature, Leonard said, "You can't bring them back."
She wondered why Suozzi did not push back the cutoff date to reduce funding until July 1, rather than May 1. That would give the social-service agencies more breathing room, she said. The one-month reprieve -- which she called a "stay of execution" -- helps little.
"If you're so confident" that the revenue enhancers will pass the Legislature, she said, "give us more time."
Subhead: What state lawmakers say
The enhancers, however, have received mixed reviews in the Legislature, even among Long Island lawmakers. Suozzi has proposed them for a number of years, and they have failed to pass each time.
Now Democratic lawmakers like Johnson and Hooper are expressing support for the measures, but their Republican counterparts are, in many cases, blaming the county's budget woes on Suozzi's management practices and insisting that Nassau must solve its own fiscal troubles, rather than relying on the state to raise taxes.
In an interview in February, Sen. Charles Fuschillo Jr., a Republican from Merrick, said, "New York state bailed out Nassau County to the tune of $105 million a number of years ago, and we've capped the cost of Child Health Plus, which is saving Nassau County tens of millions of dollars. Nassau County should start getting its own fiscal house in order and stop looking to New York state, which is having its own financial troubles, for more taxes. I'm tired of the county looking to tax people more, regardless of the tax."
Scott Reif, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Dean Skelos, a Republican from Rockville Centre, said last week, "We've been advocating cutting spending ... This is a discussion that the county executive is going to have to have with the county legislators and labor leaders down there. Obviously, everybody has been hit hard by the national economic recession ... We're advocating at the state level a mix of spending cuts, but certainly not raising taxes."
Sen. Kemp Hannon, a Republican from Garden City, said he did not have an opinion on the three revenue enhancers, other than that he supports stoplight cameras to improve public safety. He added, "It's obvious the county is in trouble and needs help."
Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg, a Democrat from Long Beach, said he has long favored stoplight cameras for the same reason. He added that the surcharge on traffic and parking tickets would allow the county to recoup the cost of processing tickets, so he supports the measure. As to the cigarette tax, he said simply, "Of course."
Mike Caputo, Joe Kellard and Judy Rattner contributed to this story. Comments about it? SBrinton@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 203.
