Joye Brown: Time ticking for Nassau budget

Where's the budget?

You know, the final 2011 Nassau County budget - nitty-gritty numbers and all - which could change the political, governmental and institutional landscape for years to come for residents and the thousands of public employees who work for them?

The final version of the document usually is made available online, or in print, usually within weeks after it is adopted by the legislature (unlike Suffolk County, where printed versions of the budget in effect didn't turn up until spring last year).

So far, there's only an executive summary available - which details the narrative of the budget, but it doesn't include enough detail to fully understand what's going on.

A summary, for example, will tell you how many employees any department has. But it doesn't tell what their positions are. Which is a problem if you're trying to, say, determine how many brass and how many officers the department has.

All of which makes an independent assessment - of County Executive Edward Mangano's proposed budget and the legislature's changes to it - impossible without supporting schedules, which are the meat of the proposal.

That's maddening, because this year's budget is different from those in years past.

The county is nine days away from a Nassau Interim Finance Authority deadline to explain how it intends to shore up soft spots that NIFA has identified in the 2011 budget.

And if those spots can't be fortified - and Mangano is insisting that they can, and that he should be the one doing the fortifying - NIFA could just lower the boom, adding Nassau to the list of state municipalities that have, or once had, fiscal oversight boards.

A control period - as compared with NIFA's current advisory role - gives boards muscle enough to intervene in budgets, borrowing and contracts. That would be a sea change for Nassau, one that potentially could impact every single resident, public service employee and municipal service.

The threat alone of a board should amount to a crisis. So what are Nassau's top political leaders doing? Peter Schmitt, the legislature's presiding officer, to his credit, added contingencies to Mangano's proposed budget - both of which are available online - in an attempt to back up some of the document's softest revenues, including $61 million in union concessions that likely remain out of reach.

Democrats in the legislature Monday had some success in pushing back two legal contracts, asking - correctly - whether the county could afford them.

Mangano, meanwhile, continued to lay the political and public relations groundwork for fighting a takeover; and he's hired a law firm to aid his effort.

Part of Mangano's PR fight is a memo from a staffer - who watched more than two years worth of recordings of NIFA's public meetings involving budgets proposed by former County Executive Thomas Suozzi, a Democrat - that's been circulating to reporters about a political "double standard" that Mangano's office says is being applied by NIFA to Mangano, a Republican.

The contents of the memo came up again Monday during a news breakfast Mangano and staff had with reporters. "I think we should be treated the way other administrations were treated," Mangano said.

Maybe he should. Maybe he shouldn't. But when the future of a county is at stake, it's got to come down to more than politics. It's got to come down to some open assessment of what lies within The Budget that (Could) Birth a Control Board.

So where's the meat? And the public's opportunity to peek inside and (try to) see exactly what's going on? Even Democrats in the legislature say they haven't received a final budget copy with the supporting schedules.

Last week, a county official said copies would be made available, perhaps as soon as this week. Which is the same promise officials made last month.

Monday, Mangano's press office sent along an e-mail with two attachments: One was an image of the final budget cover. The other was a copy of the executive summary.

Tick, tick, tick.