Text size:

Nassau first passes blame, now buck

Joye Brown

April 25, 2006

Nassau County Attorney Lorna Goodman says she won't use county taxpayers' money to pay a $63,000 legal bill, the highest to come out of a bitter fight settled more than two months ago over the leadership in the county legislature.

Goodman says taxpayers shouldn't cover the bill for attorney Steven Schlesinger - who represented Majority Leader Judy Jacobs in the battle over the presiding officer's post - because he kicked off the judicial slugfest by being the first to sue the legislature and its members.

But that doesn't mean he shouldn't be paid. After all, Schlesinger did win the battle and the leadership post for Jacobs.

Still, the cost of covering Schlesinger's $63,000 legal bill shouldn't come from the public.

Joye Brown Bio | E-mail | Recent columns

Oh, no.

It should come from the Nassau County Democratic Party.

Think about it.

Two Democratic legislators joined nine Republicans to oust Jacobs, a Democrat.

Had they won, the elected Democratic majority would have lost control of the legislature, a prospect that undoubtedly made County Executive Thomas Suozzi, another Democrat and a candidate for New York State governor, nervous.

Jacobs, in a move to shut down the coup attempt, left the Democrats and officially became a registered blank. And Schlesinger, on her behalf, sued to keep renegade Democrats Lisanne Altmann and Roger Corbin from joining with Republicans to elect Corbin the presiding officer. The resulting legal bills from all sides of this battle could cost taxpayers $160,000.

That was politics. Not government. And the distinction here is key. Confused? See if this helps.

George W. Bush and Al Gore both had plenty of lawyers in their chad-plagued fight for the White House in 2000. But they didn't ask Congress to appropriate taxpayer money to pay those bills when the election was over.

The same reasoning should apply here. The Jacobs fight was political, although it did - just as Bush v. Gore - have profound implications for government.

Too bad, but the same can't so easily be said for all of the other legal bills arising out of the Nassau legislature's self-imposed vacation from the jobs they were elected to perform when they spent weeks fighting over who would hold the legislature's highest post.

Let's say the Nassau Democratic Party pays Schlesinger's bill. That still could leave taxpayers holding the bag for up to another $96,689 in other legal bills submitted by attorneys representing the other parties in the feud.

For their part, the nine Republicans in the legislature hired one lawyer. In addition to Jacobs, the nine Democrats - for reasons most of them have yet to publicly explain - each decided to hire his or her own.

There is legal justification for taxpayers paying those bills: Legislators were sued as legislators, not as private citizens.

But that doesn't make it right - especially since their fight was as mired in gut-bucket politics as Jacob's was.

The legislature has for the first time ever scheduled itself to meet over the upcoming summer. This is supposed to make up for the meetings (but not the paychecks) it missed as the leadership battle raged on.

Here's a suggestion:

Dock lawmakers' salaries. That would pull the cost of legal bills from their pockets and not their parties or the taxpayers.

What's happening instead is that the political fighting that started this mess is flaming anew as the lawyers' bills come to light. Everybody is blaming somebody else. There's plenty of finger-pointing and handwringing. Isn't that always what happens?

Democrats and Republicans both bellied up to the legal bar for political reasons.

Somebody should have the guts to pick up the tab.

E-mail Joye Brown at Joye.Brown@Newsday.com.