Tom DiNapoli and Tom Suozzi visited the Herald's offices on Thursday to respond to questions put to them by the editorial board. Here's what they had to say.
Democratic county executive candidates speak to the issues at The Herald
Q. If you are elected county executive, in what ways will the county be different four years from now?
DiNAPOLI:/b> I certainly will dedicate myself to insuring a financially stable county. That's something that's not there right now. I think that's how the next county executive will be measured. The specific plans I've outlined talk about fundamental reform and restructuring of the finances in a way that will give us a more secure future. I'd also unleash pent up creativity that we have been lacking on many of the regional challenges that we have. And I would encourage a style of leadership that puts an emphasis on bipartisanship and consensus building.
Recognize that the county executive is not the head of a unified municipal government. It's not like being mayor of a city where all the agencies report to you. The county executive, in terms of addressing regional problems, if he's going to have a real solution, has to work with the towns and the villages and the cities and all the special districts to tackle regional problems. I'll be the county executive to not only set the inclusive agenda but work in collaboration to tackle these issues and problems, and encourage a level of shared responsibility.
SUOZZI:/b> The finances of the county will be corrected. Like the City of Glen Cove, our bond rating will be higher, we'll be more well respected by the financial community, and by the taxpayers here.
There'll be a master plan in place as far as how development over the next 50 years in this county should take place in a planned way with commercial sectors around downtown areas and stopping overdevelopment of strips.
There will be more open space that will be preserved. There will be more confidence that we're addressing issues of drinking water, pollution and related issues of cancer.
And most importantly, four years from now people will say five words with unusually great pride: I live in Nassau County.
Q. What are your plans to improve the county's public transportation system and how will you pay for them?
DiNAPOLI:/b> Public transportation is inadequate. To show the wrong-headed priorities of the current administration is that when we have our fiscal difficulties one of the first areas they went to cut was the subsidy for Long Island Bus. I said we can't allow this. I worked with [Sen.] Dean Skelos and Gov. Pataki where we put together a bipartisan response to this problem and came up with the additional $8 million to restore the subsidy.
We need to provide more opportunities for people to travel around the county by expanding the bus service. I hope to continue the good relationships I have in Albany to see if we can get the MTA to play more of a role in Long Island Bus funding than they have in the past.
I think we also need to look to high congestion areas, the so-called hub in the central part of the county. There are proposals out there that talk about not only expanded bus service, but perhaps a light-rail option. It's hard in the current state budget, which is problematic right now to come up with some money to support a study to see the feasibility of having a [north-south] spur come off from the hub to access the Coliseum and the university area there.
We also need to work with the planning groups and business and civic groups to look at the high congestion areas to see if we can come up with alternative modes of transportation is also something I'd like to encourage that the county be engaged in.
SUOZZI:/b> With all the different issues that we're going to talk about for the vision stuff to make Nassau County a better place to live in, the first thing we have to do is solve the crisis. But yes, we have to improve the transportation in the county. People have always had a high cost of living here, but in return they got a certain standard of living. One of the things that's ruining our standard of life here is the traffic that keeps on growing.
As a long-term fundamental change on traffic we need to get back to rebuilding our downtown areas and stop the overdevelopment of the strips. We need better planning about where the development takes place to promote more central business districts. But we need to do big things, too. We need to get the east side access to Manhattan so people can take the train in. Right now, half the people who go into the city every day to go to work still drive.
We need to get some of the trucks off the LIE. We need to have high-speed ferry service for trucks from Connecticut to Suffolk County where they have vacant land on the waterfront next to rail lines; then you can put the containers on the rail lines into New York City and New Jersey and the rest of the country. But we need to stop having all these trucks just traveling through Nassau and Suffolk on the way to go somewhere else.
And we need to do a much better job with the North-South transportation. I think there's opportunities to do that as part of the redevelopment of the hub to actually connect the North Shore to the South Shore.
Q. Do you think Nassau County Police Officers are paid too much, and what changes do you propose to get a handle on that portion of the budget?
DiNAPOLI:/b> I think when you're looking at all the collective bargaining units, as I've said to all my friends on the unions, "It's not going to be business as usual in Nassau County anymore. It can't be." All of the contracts have an impact on the bottom line in the county. If we're straightening out our act and being more efficient, the county is going to have to have more clearly identified goals to helping the county's finances through the contract and labor-relations process.
I don't think that we can solve the county's problems on the backs of the people who work for the county. They didn't unilaterally negotiate these contracts.
The police have a very tough job. An outstanding police officer, I don't know how much you can pay somebody to do that kind of job to put their lives on the line. But we certainly know our Nassau County police officers are paid, relative to other areas of the state, a very generous amount of compensation especially when you add in the benefits. We've got to be realistic. We're not going to undo decades of contractual arrangements. But we have to be more careful in future contract negotiations and we have to work with the unions and say "we need more productivity and more of a return for the county" so we have a more stable future down the road.
We do need to put a priority on civilianization, but not by issuing a press release as my opponent has done. You can't do that outside of a contract. Gulotta has a civilianization proposal on the table, and it's tied up with the stalled police contract that's not going anywhere right now. So you have to be realistic. You don't achieve civilianization by saying, "I'm going to do it." You achieve it by hammering out an agreement with the police unions, and that's something I want to do as part of a shared vision that the people who work for the county and the people who live in the county are part of the dialogue in developing.
SUOZZI:/b> I've said many times in the past that we can't afford to pay the police as much as we're paying them, but there's nothing we can really do about the salaries itself [because of state laws requiring binding arbitration]. I don't believe in layoffs. I think that's very bad for morale; it's an unhealthy threat to any employee. And I don't believe in trying to take away stuff that people already have.
But I have proposed a $40 million savings in the county police department. Right now we have hundreds of police officers that are working in non-police work. They work as auto-body mechanics, carpenters, electricians, desk clerks, all civilian-type jobs. They should all be out into the field. And no new police officers should be hired in their place. That way we'll reduce the overall size of the force, and we'll have more cops out on the street. We'll improve public safety and we'll cut $40 million from the police department.
Q. Parks: What will you do about the lack of security and maintenance at county parks?
DiNAPOLI:/b> Our parks, all of our infrastructure, are deteriorating and are a visible legacy of the neglect and lack of management over the years. We need to be creative in a number of ways. We need to reestablish an open space and parks advisory committee, to reinstill a sense of stewardship about our parks in county government, and certainly work with and expand Friends of the Park organizations to leverage support from corporate sectors.
We need to prioritize what the maintenance and capital needs are for the parks and be very clear about what we can and can't do. We need to have a long term plan and strategy for how we manage the parks in a much more efficient and effective way.
This is another case where we need to not be afraid to do things differently just because we haven't done them before. I'm involved with a project now working with the town and the county that sets up a model for other opportunities to do a similar kind of bold initiative. We've got two park beaches, one the town's and one the county's. The town park beach is a beautiful facility, the county one is falling apart; no one wants to go there. We've worked out, with some help from the state, a shared service agreement between the town and the county where the town will lease it from the county and the town will now operate it and it will be part of a unified park area. This way the county retains ownership while saving the money it would spend on maintenance because the town will pay that. And the area is enhanced for the people's use.
We need to do more like that, to meet with town and village leaders and see where there's other opportunities for similar shared agreements.
SUOZZI:/b> It all has to do with how things are managed. They need to be managed more properly. We need to have employees taking more responsibility for the jobs that they do. Right now in Nassau County government, people are rewarded based on political connections, not based on their performance. That's demoralizing for the entire work force.
In Glen Cove we set up a performance evaluation system whereby workers are evaluated on an annual basis. I have fired people, suspended people, given people merit raises, and I never once had a grievance go to arbitration the whole time I've been mayor.
I've reduced the size of our workforce, but our streets are cleaner, our parks are cleaner, less complaints in our public works department. So we need to get more out of our existing workforce.
I don't believe we should privatize any of our revenue generating opportunities, we just need to run them better and make more revenues out of them.
For the parks we need to get a better management system and set goals for what we want to accomplish. We need leadership and a new culture of accountability and responsibility.
Q. Coliseum: What do you think about building a new coliseum or coliseum complex?
DiNAPOLI:/b> We need a new coliseum. We need to work with the folks who have the lease arrangements now. I'd like to see if there are some other sports franchises to bring there. There are other proposals to develop the area in terms of hotels, convention center and so on. I'm willing to look at that, but the priority must be to have a first-class sports facility there and that requires a new facility.
SUOZZI:/b> There's no reason that coliseum shouldn't be a world-class facility. There's no reason we can't have an NBA team in Nassau County. I'm not going to give any tax subsidies to a private developer, but I'll give a private developer an opportunity to make money out of the property while we still get what we want which is a world-class facility that generates revenues to our tax base.
I will make it a major priority of mine to have a master plan for the hub that takes into account all the different concerns of the civic groups, environmentalists, the developers, the property owners and the government agencies and convene a visioning group to develop a master plan for that area that connects everything together with walkways and bikeways and Eisenhower Park, the colleges, Mitchel Field, Roosevelt Field and the Coliseum.
Q.What, if anything, would you do to improve the environmental health of the county?
DiNAPOLI:/b> This is a very important issue and one of the things that concerns me is that the county really doesn't have an environmental strategy. I want to establish an office of environmental protection. That's how you dedicate priority and resources when you do something like that.
I'm not talking about a whole new bureaucracy. We've got now the public works department that deals with infrastructure, the health department that deals with testing, monitoring, and the parks department that has a role in terms of open spaces. Have a coordinating office that doesn't have those three agencies going in different directions and set up a priority on environmental issues with a real passion for protecting the environment from an aesthetic point of view, but certainly also from a public health point of view.
The county can play a role with being the regional voice, in coming up with a regional plan on water strategy and water policy and work then with the state DEC and the individual water districts who I think would welcome an ambitious water modeling program.
SUOZZI:/b> My whole race is based on, "I can do it because I've done it." I have been endorsed by the League of Conservation Voters in this race. I received the Environmental Quality Award from the Environmental Protection Agency back in 1997, I was the Man of the year for the Coalition to Save Hempstead Harbor, many Long Island Sound groups have honored me. We're a national model in Glen Cove for our environmental cleanup.
I'm going to do the same things I did in Glen Cove, which is identify these problems, and bring the resources to bear necessary to solve them. Freeport Power Plant, all I did was have a press conference on it, which is all I could do [as a candidate], but I guarantee that got more people to pay attention to it. And I will do more things like that to bring the resources to bear. The key is to navigate the bureaucratic maze that exists.
We developed a master plan as to where we wanted to go in Glen Cove and we showed everybody what we could do if we all did our jobs. I'll do the same thing in Nassau County.
There's a great opportunity for redevelopment of polluted property. You can't just look at them as blights. Develops want to go to open spaces because it's easy because developing polluted property is too much work involved. Too risky. If we as a public policy want to enable development of the polluted sites here, that we'd rather recycle contaminated properties instead of using up a pristine property which we surely do not want to do, we have to figure out ways to make it easier for a developer to do so. By easier I don't mean at the expense of health and safety, I mean setting up the road map necessary, the vision necessary to take us from here to there.
Q. What amount of a tax increase will you seek from the County Legislature when you submit your first budget?
DiNAPOLI:/b> Well, you have to ask me when I submit the first budget, but we know the long-term bipartisan plan that NIFA hammered out last year set a target of 5-percent increase. Obviously, that's a target and a goal if we can do better than that and not have a tax increase that would be wonderful but we have to be realistic about it. Given the current fiscal situation, I don't know if we're going to be able to do that. But we should certainly strive to. I'm not in there yet, so it's not there for me to pick a target on a tax number, but people don't want to see this problem solved by raising taxes. Tax increases should always be the solution of last resort. We need to hold taxes down.
SUOZZI:/b> Right now I don't think I need to raise taxes. I'm not making any pledge that I'm not raising taxes, but based on what I've learned and also my $100 million tax savings plan, I don't think we'll need a tax increase. Now, part of the four-year NIFA plan that's already proposed is that there be a 5-percent tax increase every year. I'm not saying that we're not going to do that. But I don't think any additional tax is necessary.
Q. Human services cutbacks: What will you do to restore and improve the level of human services provided to county residents?
DiNAPOLI:/b> There were other places the county could have cut other than human services. The cutbacks really hurt our contract agencies, organizations that help our young people, seniors, those with drug, alcohol and mental health problems. So we need to reestablish that partnership and hopefully work with them to create better partnerships amongst themselves to realize some efficiencies and be sure that every neighborhood has access to quality services.
I think we should also reduce some of the paperwork that's required of them when they have to get their approvals and their vouchers. It costs the county and the agency money to go through all the steps to get the agency money. Cut the administrative overhead, and they'll get their money more quickly so that they can spend more resources directly on services.
SUOZZI:/b> It's got to be managed better than it is. We have a responsibility to provide better human services to our community, especially to the most vulnerable: the indigent, the elderly, young children.
But I believe that, again, proper management and employee evaluations with rewarding employees that do a good job will inspire workers to do a better job in proving services to people.
Right now we say we're going to give a grant to this agency or this social-services group, and we don't give them the money 'til 18 months later. Well, they were relying on that money, they were providing that service so they have to borrow the money in the private sector and pay interest on the money. So instead of providing meals to some home-bound elderly person, they're paying interest on the money they had to borrow because the county didn't give them the money they said they were going to give them.
Q. Is duplication of services between the county, towns and state a problem? If you think so, what will you do about it?
DiNAPOLI:/b> Parks, roads, plowing and maintenance, yes, there's a problem with all the duplication. We need to talk to each other. This is common sense about doing business differently. We have a town road and a county road and they intersect, you don't need two snow plows. Maybe there's some opportunities there where the county will do some of the town work and village work and vice versa. I think we have a master plan and a detailed strategy we can realize efficiencies by deploying road crews in a more cost-effective way.
SUOZZI:/b> Duplication is a very big problem. What the county executive should do is have a summit of all these different interests to figure out what we can do together so that we all win and we all save money. We need to team up to do cooperative purchasing as a group for cost savings. I did this in Glen Cove with my waterfront project where I literally put together dozens of competing interests to develop a master plan.
Q. Affordable housing: So many people can't find affordable rental housing or affordable homes. What will you do about that?
DiNAPOLI:/b> I think we need to be the convener of the interests, with the towns and the villages and the cities and the not-for-profit organizations like the Long Island Housing Partnership, who in other counties like Suffolk have done ambitious programs. Identify parcels that can be developed with a priority on rental units that would be attractive to young people just starting out or to senior citizens. Again it will take having a sense of planning, a master plan, and revitalizing our planning role in the county.
SUOZZI:/b> We need more affordable housing. The reason we don't have more affordable housing is because people don't want it in their back yard. I've proposed that we build more affordable housing, targeting especially senior citizens and young people, recent college graduates, on commercial strips. This will stop the overdevelopment of more retail on the commercial strips [instead of downtowns].
Also, people who live in the housing on commercial strips will be geographically proximate, near the downtowns so they can walk from the housing into the downtowns, which is a very positive thing to do. It creates pedestrian communities which will have a positive impact on traffic and help to support the downtowns. And on those commercial strips, you're not going to have people come out and say, "We don't want that housing on Hempstead Turnpike." People won't say not in my backyard on Hempstead Turnpike because they would rather see senior citizen townhouses or young people moving into the community and young families moving in, instead of another 7-Eleven or high traffic generator to further erode the quality of life for the rest of the suburban neighborhoods.
Q. What have you learned from people during your campaigning that you didn't know before you started running the race for county executive?
DiNAPOLI:/b> I've learned that many of the issues people are concerned about, while there are always certain neighborhood issues that are somewhat unique, I think the overall issues are pretty much the same. People are concerned about the quality of services, they don't want to see solutions [solved just by] taxes going up. They're anxious for change. They want to give the Democratic Party an opportunity in ways they haven't done in over a generation. They think it's time for there to be a new party and new person in the county executive office.
I think most people, while they're angry about what's gone on, like me they're optimists about the future. They think these problems are manageable. And while they will not be patient forever, are willing to let the next county executive have an opportunity to be bold, to be aggressive in coming up with a real ambitious plan for changing the county. People are ready for change.
SUOZZI:/b> I've learned how similar the concerns of people are in every single community. Everybody's sick and tired of the idea of the political machine and the patronage. It cuts across party lines, income groups, races, ethnicities. And when I talk about the political machine, I'm not knocking Republicans. I need Republicans to vote for me in the general election. I'm talking about the idea of one-party government. People are fed up with that.
I've also learned a great deal about the minority communities. I think a lot of times we define communities by their commercial centers. [But just beyond the downtowns,] there are all solid, middle-class homes there where people mow their lawns and plant flowers and go to work every day and worry about their kids' education and streets getting paved and how much they pay in taxes. The concerns on those neighborhoods are the same as in every other neighborhood about their families and their roads and their schools and their taxes.
