Edward Mangano’s two terms marked by crises

As Nassau County executive, Edward Mangano took calls from President Barack Obama after superstorm Sandy. He held news conferences with former Mets great Dwight Gooden and rock star Dee Snider. And he formed a close friendship with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

But by the time Mangano left office on Dec. 31, he had reached the low point of his 21-year political career.

Mangano and former Oyster Bay Town Supervisor John Venditto were charged in October 2016 with conspiring to award hundreds of thousands of dollars in county contracts to restaurateur Harendra Singh — a 25-year friend of Mangano and his wife, Linda — and helping him secure indirect loan guarantees from the town.

Edward Mangano has been charged with conspiracy, bribery, wire fraud, extortion and obstruction of justice. Venditto is charged with conspiracy, bribery, securities fraud, wire fraud, making false statements and obstruction of justice. Linda Mangano is charged with making false statements, conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

Their trial begins Monday in a federal courtroom in Central Islip.

All have pleaded not guilty, and Edward Mangano in an interview declined to discuss the case — beyond saying the charges never interfered with his management of the county.

“If it had, I would have resigned,” he said.

Newsday interviewed former county aides, political analysts, family friends and administration critics to discuss Mangano and his time in office.

They paint a picture of a man who entered office with high ideals but who was plagued by crisis after crisis — some unexpected and others self-inflicted.

The job took its toll. After quitting smoking decades earlier, he picked up the habit again after Nassau Police Officer Arthur Lopez was shot and killed in 2012 attempting to arrest a hit-and-run driver. Mangano continues to smoke, said Eden Laikin, a longtime friend of the Manganos who ran the county’s drug abuse prevention program for Mangano. Laikin is also a former Newsday reporter.

“It’s a mentally taxing, emotionally taxing job that requires your full attention,” Mangano said.

In 2009, when he announced his first campaign for county executive, Mangano was an intellectual property attorney and GOP county legislator from Bethpage, best known to the public for helping redevelop the former Northrop Grumman property in Bethpage.

Mangano touted his blue-collar roots — he had worked as a janitor in high school to pay for college — ran a grass-roots campaign focused on smaller government and lower taxes, and defeated incumbent Democrat Thomas Suozzi by 386 votes.

Mangano’s difficulties started right away.

During his January 2010 inauguration, Mangano fulfilled a campaign promise, signing a repeal of Suozzi’s home energy tax. Supporters were elated, chanting “Eddie, Eddie, Eddie.”

But the move had immediate fiscal consequences, opening a $39 million budget gap that foreshadowed deficits that would persist during his two terms.

Days later, with aides still unpacking boxes, a two-page letter arrived from Ron Stack, then chairman of the Nassau Interim Finance Authority, a state monitoring board that has been overseeing the county’s finances since 2011, ordering Mangano to revise his budget to make up for the lost revenue.

“I had just had taken office and got this letter without a conversation or meeting,” Mangano recalled in an hourlong interview in December. “I was like ‘What is going on? That doesn’t seem right.’”

A year later, NIFA froze the wages of 6,000 county employees and took control of Nassau’s finances, saying the county’s $2.6 billion budget was out of balance by $176 million. Mangano sued to stop the takeover and lost.

He spent much of his first term butting heads with the board over spending cuts, borrowing and revenue hikes.

NIFA board member Chris Wright faulted Mangano for never acknowledging the persistent deficits between recurring expenditures and revenues.

“It’s difficult, if not impossible, to cure something when you refuse a proper diagnosis,” Wright said.

But Mangano defended his record, swatting away criticism that his administration had been anything less than a complete success.

“In almost every area we have met our challenges and exceeded them and certainly leave them in better shape,” he said.

Mangano found stronger footing late in his first term, largely due to his response to Sandy in October 2012.

He became the public face of Nassau’s storm recovery, appearing in his blue county windbreaker at televised news conferences with Cuomo and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to detail efforts to get power restored and the county sewer system back on line.

Deputy County Executive Ed Ward recalled riding with Mangano in early November 2012 through Long Beach.

“I saw something I never thought I would see: people in a residential area sitting around a bin of firewood keeping warm because they couldn’t go to their houses,” Ward said. “A third of this county was underwater and destroyed; he brought this county back.”

In November 2013, Mangano defeated Suozzi in a rematch by 18 percentage points.

But when Mangano left office four years later, many of his signature policy initiatives were incomplete:

• A 2011 referendum asking taxpayers to spend up to $400 million to rebuild the Nassau Coliseum was soundly rejected and the New York Islanders moved to Brooklyn’s Barclays Center two years later.

While developer Forest City Ratner renovated the Coliseum using $160 million in private funds, a planned retail and entertainment center next door still has not been built.

The Islanders plan to build a new arena at Belmont Park but will play 60 games at the Coliseum during the three-year construction and environmental review period.

• Nassau continues to fall short of a key marker of healthy municipalities: Balance between recurring revenues and expenses. In 2017, the structural deficit was estimated at $58 million. Also, Nassau continues to rely on borrowing and the sale of assets to reduce its long-term debt, which totals roughly $3.5 billion.
• Mangano tried to reduce Nassau’s costs for property tax refunds, for which the county had been borrowing $100 million a year.

But his policy of offering assessment reductions before tax bills went out ended up creating a greater imbalance between those who grieve their assessments and those who don’t, according to a Newsday analysis last year.

• Nassau saved about $30 million annually by outsourcing operation of its bus and sewer systems and inmate health care at the county jail. But it faces millions of dollars in civil claims after more than a dozen inmates died at the jail while a private contractor was providing care. And the county bus system has seen a reduction in routes and services.

Particularly in his first term, Mangano clashed frequently with county labor unions — first over a plan to consolidate Nassau’s eight police precincts into four, and later after proposing a bill to allow him to open up collective bargaining agreements to cut wages and benefits to pay for a backlog of property tax judgments.

More than 2,000 union members from across the state crowded the streets of Mineola to protest the so-called “King Mangano” bill, and a federal court eventually blocked Nassau from implementing it.

But in his second term, which began in 2014, Mangano worked with former NIFA chairman Jon Kaiman, a former North Hempstead Town supervisor, and the five major public employee unions to end the pay freeze. The unions agreed to new collective bargaining agreements that boosted workers’ pay by a total of more than 13 percent.

In exchange, new union workers agreed for the first time to pay a portion of their pension and health insurance costs. Unions also waived the right to litigate for past pay increases.

“Mangano had a huge learning curve and didn’t handle the first term well,” said Jerry Laricchiuta, president of the 8,700-member Civil Service Employees Association, Nassau’s largest union. “The second term was better. He learned the job.”

Mangano also tried to reduce the cost of operating Nassau’s property assessment system, which was generating $100 million in annual debt to pay refunds to homeowners.

He froze assessments, cut Assessment Department staff and began settling nearly all residential challenges before tax rolls were set each year. The plan saved $20 million to $30 million annually but gave homeowners incentives to file challenges.

Homeowners filed a record of about 216,000 grievances in 2016; about 75 percent resulted in reductions.

The effect was a shift in the tax burden from wealthier residents who appealed and got tax reductions, to those who did not appeal. Those homeowners saw their tax bills grow by an average 35 percent. The change also created a financial windfall for politically connected law firms that help residents challenge their assessments.

A planned reassessment of more than 400,000 properties, expected to bring balance to the system, is expected to occur in 2019.

Jeff Gold, a Bellmore tax attorney and former Assessment Review Commission member, said Mangano’s changes forced residents to file grievances to ensure they were not being overcharged. “He destroyed accuracy in favor of expediency,” said Gold, a Democrat who lost a race for Nassau County legislature in November.

Mangano’s record managing Nassau’s nearly $3 billion budget was mixed.

He increased the county property tax levy once, by 3.4 percent in 2014, but hiked the fees for businesses, park services and traffic tickets. Mangano also instituted a school zone speed camera program that raised $30 million, but Nassau lawmakers repealed the program after intense community opposition.

Mangano had hoped for a windfall of more than $700 million by selling the county’s sewage treatment system to a concessionaire. But NIFA blocked the move, calling it a one-shot revenue and “backdoor borrowing.”

In outsourcing Nassau’s bus system to a private operator, the county saves about $9 million a year in subsidies. But the bus system, known as Nassau Inter-County Express, or NICE, has suffered frequent budget cuts, leading to the reduction or elimination of eight routes.

“Drastic funding cuts have inevitably led to service cuts for Nassau County residents who often have no alternative means of transportation, meaning even longer waits and longer commutes,” said Vincent Pellecchia, associate director of the tristate Transportation Campaign, a nonprofit advocacy group in Manhattan.

Nassau also outsourced inmate health care at the county jail in East Meadow. The contract with Armor Correctional Health Services spawned six federal lawsuits against the county over inmate deaths.

The state Commission of Correction found that Armor, which ended its six-year tenure at the jail in August, failed to provide adequate care for at least eight of the 14 inmates who died while the company was providing services at the jail. Armor said patients received proper care in the jail.

Mangano said the contract was necessary, and saved the county $10 million a year.

“I regret any loss of life that occurs,” he said. “Unfortunately in the area of health care,” such outside contracts are “a reality,” he said.

Meanwhile, Mangano’s signature public-private partnership — renovation of the Coliseum — had a rocky road almost until its completion in 2017.

In August 2011, Mangano held a referendum to borrow up to $400 million to rebuild the arena. County voters rejected the plan 57 percent to 43 percent, and the Islanders announced the next year they would leave for Brooklyn.

“I thought it was the right thing to do,” Mangano said of the referendum. “Before the Islanders were to leave we gave our residents an opportunity to invest in them and the Coliseum itself. And obviously the vote did not bear that out.”

In 2013, the county selected Ratner to renovate the old arena, which dated to 1972.

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is building an outpatient treatment center next to the arena and the state will invest $85 million to build parking garages allowing for more development. But Northwell Health killed plans for a $350 million Center for Bioelectronic Medicine, citing cost.

“Ed was handed a lemon when the Islanders left,” said Kevin Law, president of the Long Island Association, the region’s largest business group. “He came up with a plan to try to make lemonade with those lemons and deserves credit for getting something done.”

But as Mangano prepared to leave office last year, the spotlight turned to the Islanders’ arena project at Belmont.

On Dec. 20 — with 11 days remaining before Democratic County Executive-elect Laura Curran was to take office — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo held a news conference at Belmont to announce that the Islanders would be returning home to Long Island and would spend $1 billion to build an 18,000-seat arena, 250-room hotel and 435,000 square feet of retail at the state-run park.

Mangano, who had continued to advocate for the Islanders’ return to Nassau, sat quietly in the front row. The lawmakers, sports figures and celebrities on the dais rarely mentioned his name or acknowledged his efforts on the project.

He left shortly after the event, barely noticed by members of the news media who rushed to interview Curran.

By Robert Brodsky

robert.brodsky@newsday.com@BrodskyRobert

Robert Brodsky is a breaking news reporter who has worked at Newsday since 2011. He is a Queens College and American University alum.