Editorial
OPINION: Angry property owners - LI's newest political party
Desmond Ryan is executive director of the Association for a Better Long Island, a Hauppauge-based developers group.
Forget the traditional political labels on Long Island. They don't exist anymore.
Tuesday's election results suggest there are only those who've been savaged by the recession and those who've managed to channel the pain. Voters sent a targeted message to incumbents that if you appear insular, incompetent or indifferent to the economic crisis facing property-tax payers, you run the serious risk of being unemployed.
In the most dramatic example of seething constituent anger, Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi went from a well-entrenched incumbent and glib sound bite master to a precarious survivor with a razor-thin margin that could disappear on recount.
Regardless of whether he manages to remain as county executive, his often-stated desire of running for statewide office died a very public death on Election Night. He has no mandate from his home county base, which has always been an essential criteria for higher office.
But the real news isn't what may or may not happen to Suozzi, but the fact that the Republicans will take control of the Nassau County Legislature. The GOP fully appreciates what has occurred here, and why. Its members will reaffirm the voters' ballot-box decision by openly confronting Suozzi's policies, budgets and press pronouncements. With the power of the majority, there will be few areas in his administration they will not question.
And if the absentee ballots tip the results in favor of Edward Mangano, he will be mandated to look at county government with a clean sheet of paper, making it clear to the taxpayer that the GOP has been reinvented as the political party of fiscal austerity and tough operational discipline.
Regardless of how the county executive race finally ends up, expect that one of the first items on the Republican-controlled legislative agenda will be the dysfunctional property assessment and tax certiorari process, which reaches into the pocket of every homeowner. The issue remains an open wound for everyone who gets a property-tax bill, and there's little doubt that it contributed to voting decisions on Tuesday. Certainly, it was a major issue during the campaign.
It remains a political mystery why Suozzi insisted on making this swamp his own, but last November he convinced voters to dismiss an elected chairman of the board of assessors and allow him to appoint "a professional." There's been no sign of improvement and meanwhile, the county has used every bureaucratic obstacle it can conjure to block court-ordered tax refunds. The Democrats must have assumed few voters would understand the ruse, but many reminded them on Election Day that they didn't sleep through basic math.
The new Republican majority in the county legislature will need to be much more than critics. That's what they did as members of the minority, but voters won't have patience for that any longer, now that they have given the Republicans the power to move legislation.
Republicans will need to come up with a business-based agenda that asks how the county can generate new revenue, restore gutted administrative services, and reduce the burden on property owners. They will do so at a time when the tax certiorari debacle has put the county into a $200-million hole, with more residential certiorari claims against Nassau County than at any time in history.
The suburbs were invented here, and Suozzi has often spoken of the "new Nassau." In a recession where middle-class residents have not only lost their 401(k)s, but their ability to hold on to their largest investment, their homes, none of the previous political rhetoric matters anymore. Those political pilot fish, the Working Families Party and the Independence Party, should take note: Their role has been eclipsed by the party of angry property owners. Each one of those nearly 70,000 pending tax certiorari claims likely represents at least one very angry voter who made it a point to get to the polls this week. They've created a new political party that is focused on one thing - the survival of the Long Island property owner - and upended the status quo.
