Mangano vows to make Nassau budget balance

Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano's proposed 2011 budget proposal is balanced. On paper. But Friday, in his first extended interview on the plan, Mangano said he is committed to making it balance in real life.

"This is a responsible plan and we have thought it through," he said. "We are going to tackle the structural things that have crippled Nassau for two decades. I am committed to getting it done."

Getting it done is going to be a challenge.

A week and a half ago, Mangano said he would "order" union savings. He also said he would shift to towns, villages and school districts the cost of paying back millions of dollars in interest and other fees in successful property tax challenge cases.

Experts in labor relations last week said they doubt Mangano had the authority to unilaterally change already negotiated union contracts. It's been tried in other municipalities, they said, and it's failed.

"We have a road map and our legal team says it will work," Mangano said, declining to elaborate on specifics of the strategy. His administration has sent a resolution to the county legislature asking for the power to make $60 million in labor-union-related cuts.

The unprecedented request is likely to pass in the legislature, probably after questioning by some lawmakers. The bottom line, however, is that Mangano will have to convince his fellow Republicans, who hold the majority, that he has a workable plan - and the stomach - to see it through.

Mangano said he has both.

"We have worked out every scenario," he said. "If there are lawsuits, we will go to court and defend our position. If it takes a month, four months or two years."

Mangano, who is usually soft-spoken, put considerable volume behind his voice when he talked of his intentions. He is acutely aware that he's staking his political reputation on getting results.

The current structural gap in spending and revenue in Nassau is wide enough to qualify as the county's third fiscal crisis in two decades. In the early 1990s, the state gave the county permission to borrow $65 million to cover costs that usually would be paid out of operating expenses. And the county's Board of Supervisors, in 1992, ordered 3,000 layoffs.

The state comptroller at the time, Carl McCall, then began to release reports on the county's condition - reports that were ignored as the county began to slip toward insolvency a few years later.

By 2000, Nassau's finances began being monitored by a state-appointed oversight board, the Nassau Interim Finance Authority, so deep were its financial woes. The state also approved $105 million in aid to the county to speed a path toward solid finances.

Mangano inherited a budget from former Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi that would have been difficult to manage, even had Suozzi won a third term. But Mangano made the task significantly harder on himself by canceling an energy tax and, in a four-year budget plan, a projected increase in property taxes.

He said that the only way to really fix Nassau's finances is to control cost by eliminating its structural problems.

So, in addition to going after the escalating cost of contracts (Mangano would not comment on reports that unions and the administration are now negotiating), he is also looking to turn back a practice embedded in the county charter - that all county taxpayers bear the cost of property tax challenge interest and refunds that in every other county in New York would be the responsibility of towns, villages and school districts.

"We're going to change the charter," Mangano said, his voice rising. "Most of the tax refunds are for commercial properties. It is unfair for taxpayers in commercial-poor places like Plainedge and Roosevelt to have to pay the cost of refunds."

Mangano is also promising to tackle the assessment system itself. And he said he's received positive feedback from some of the businesses that would be hit with a third part of his plan: Making not-for-profits, like hospitals, pay for the cost of using county sewers.

It's all ambitious.

And risky, especially for a proposed budget and four-year plan that depends so much on Mangano hitting his marks.