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Long Islanders had big role in pension reform push

Joye Brown

June 24, 2008

Take a bow, Long Island.

Yesterday, state lawmakers moved swiftly to pass unusually strong legislation ending two forms of flagrant pension fraud.

And you had a hand in it.

According to lawmakers, every time Newsday ran a story about contract lawyers masquerading as full-time school district employees, or highly paid administrators receiving fat pensions, their telephones would begin to ring.

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"We'd get tons and tons of calls after every single story," Tom Dunham, spokesman for state Sen. Dean Skelos (R-Rockville Centre), said yesterday.

"One time, the senator had a telephone town hall meeting and half the calls were about this," he said, "and Newsday didn't even have a story in the paper that day."

Telephone calls.

E-mails.

Letters.

"Everybody from all over the Island was calling me," Assemb. Harvey Weisenberg (D-Long Beach), a retired teacher, told Newsday.

Other lawmakers said they were stopped by furious constituents at their local bagel or grocery store.

And that fury escalated as Andrew Cuomo, the state's attorney general; Thomas DiNapoli, the state comptroller; and federal authorities began digging in.

It took only four months - between Newsday's first published report and yesterday's state Senate vote - for the legislature to pass strong pension reform measures.

That's lightening speed in any bureaucracy. But there's something larger afoot here.

For more than three decades, Long Island school districts thought nothing about carrying contract attorneys as full-time employees.

Or of allowing school district administrators to retire one day, only to be rehired the next - earning both a pension and a salary for doing the exact same job.

It was outright taxpayer abuse.

The practices were so common in Nassau and Suffolk that until recently some school districts defended them.

It was all part of a culture of corruption on Long Island that runs so wide and so deep that for decades it was shrugged off as business as usual.

No more.