Nassau mess may bring a financial control board

Nassau County could be getting a financial control board.

That's how bad county finances are - no matter how many times County Executive Edward Mangano promises to make needed, structural change.

In a meeting Tuesday, the Nassau Interim Finance Authority very publicly handed Mangano his head, calling him out for a proposed 2011 budget that's balanced only on paper.

But at least Mangano, who requested the meeting, had the backbone to try to explain his thinking on the proposal. No other elected county official - not the legislative leadership nor the comptroller - showed up. Even though the meeting was in Mineola, across the street from the building where all but the comptroller works.

That's bad. If only because it shows that Nassau's leadership has yet to absorb the reality that Nassau's finances are as dismal today as they were a decade ago.

During NIFA's early years, the authority had the power to approve county budgets. The board would review a proposal and tell county officials what needed to be fixed to gain its OK.

On Tuesday, NIFA told Mangano that the proposed 2011 budget didn't pass muster. It was a brutal assessment. But one that - since NIFA doesn't have the power to approve budgets anymore - leaves Mangano free to propose whatever he wishes. And leaves the county legislature free to approve whatever it wishes too.

This year's process, as Mangano pointed out at the meeting, is just starting. There is an independent budget review office, which will offer up an opinion. And the county comptroller, which will offer up one too. And the legislature will hold hearings before voting on the measure.

Meanwhile, Mangano's administration is already trying to fill one of the proposal's big holes - $61 million in union concessions, which Mangano says he will "order" if ongoing negotiations are unsuccessful.

Still, NIFA's hardly out of the game. Just because it's lost the ability to influence the county budget doesn't make the authority weak. Ironically, the only arrow NIFA retains is a nuclear-powered one: The ability to assume control over Nassau's finances.

All it would take is a county operating budget that is more than 1 percent out of balance.

One percent?

That's less than the $26 million in subsidy that Mangano's budget assumes will come from the MTA - a sum the MTA does not have in its own budget. NIFA identified that subsidy, along with labor savings, borrowing and other assumed revenue totaling a whopping $244.4 million as uncertain.

All of which could trigger NIFA - no matter how reluctant - to morph into a full-blown control board in one of the richest counties in the nation.

Think of it. Come next year, Nassau could be under a control panel, as Buffalo was, that could negate county-union contracts. And order spending cuts. A board that could have the ability, finally, to make Nassau, after a decade of fiscal fits and starts, climb up to its own two feet.

Even the threat of a control board could be a good thing, if only to convince elected officials and county unions that the same-old, same-old - such as save now, pay more later - isn't going to work anymore.

On Tuesday, in addition to slamming Mangano, NIFA approved a measure to hire attorneys to determine the logistics and the law of becoming a control board.