OPINION: Mangano's budget shows hollowness of his campaign pledges
Jay Jacobs is the Nassau County and New York State Democratic Chairman.
Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano needs to take responsibility for campaigning on a promise that he had to have known was false and for failing to deliver on it now that he is in office.
The premise upon which he was elected - that he would root out the waste, abuse, mismanagement and worthless patronage (jobs for politically connected cronies) rampant in the Suozzi-Democratic budgets - was a political fraud. The budget he presented earlier this month proves it. Accordingly, Mangano should resign.
For eight years, Mangano, Peter Schmitt and their Republican colleagues in the Nassau County Legislature had been selling the voters the same bill of goods; last year, the voters finally bought it, throwing County Executive Tom Suozzi out of office and the Democratic County legislative majority out of power. Mangano took office with a self-imposed mandate to repeal the "unneeded" 2.5 percent energy sales tax imposed by the Democrats.
So now, a year later, we've come to Mangano's first budget. While the county has had a long history of significant labor costs, Suozzi left Mangano a budget with enough revenue sources to support those costs. But Mangano repealed the energy tax, blowing a $40-million hole in the budget. And even with sales tax receipts rebounding, Mangano can't balance the books without cooking them. The budget he has proposed adds $364 million to the county's debt, just to pay for operations he can't afford.
And why not? Surely, Mangano can cut all of those wasteful patronage jobs that Suozzi had hidden in his budgets all those years. Surely he can pare away the many wasteful programs Democrats used to pad the budgets. And surely the Republican legislative majority can recommend a better, more efficient way to run government.
Those were the promises they ran on. Those are the expectations that Nassau's voters had when they cast their ballots for them.
Mangano bills his budget as a "no-tax-increase budget," but with a massive additional debt burden, he is passing today's energy-tax cut to tomorrow's taxpayer.
The truth is that for eight years, the Republicans were wrong. And Mangano, who served in the legislature reviewing every budget detail since 1996, had to have known it. But even with 13 straight independent bond rating-agency upgrades under Suozzi and the Democrats, the Republicans maintained that we weren't fit to govern. Last year, they ran on that premise and sold the voters on a clear promise: to cut that which the Democrats would not and to end the legacy of debt that they claimed Democrats were creating.
Mangano's budget proves that there's no patronage to cut, no waste to uncover and no unnecessary programs to eliminate. Mangano must have known that all along, but that didn't stop him from claiming differently to get elected. In fact, the very practices he erroneously charged the Democrats with carrying out are now an integral part of his budget. We're back to Tom Gullota with budgeting built on debt, phony one-shot revenue projections and creative accounting.
Mangano ran on a false promise that he now can't keep. He touted the Nassau Interim Finance Authority's critique of the Suozzi budget, and scared voters with details from a mandated multiyear plan that he knew might never come to pass in order to win his slender majority.
Now, that same NIFA has rendered his budget untenable and the threat of a state takeover of the county looms over us once again, for the first time in nine years.
When he first ran for county executive back in 2001, Tom Suozzi campaigned on a theme that promised to fix Nassau's problems, proclaiming: "I can do it, because I've done it." Mangano and his Republican colleagues ran on the theme that they would cut costs and reduce taxes while better managing Nassau's fiscal house. Voters now know the truth: They couldn't do it, because it couldn't be done. If it could have been done, the Democrats would have done it.
Worst of all, Ed Mangano knew that all along. And that's why he should resign.
