Groups file lawsuit over sewer funds use

Two environmental groups filed a lawsuit Wednesday to block County Executive Steve Levy and the county legislature from raiding surpluses from the county sewer fund to help balance the budget without getting voter approval in a mandatory referendum.

Richard Amper, executive director of the Long Island Pine Barrens Society, said their attorney, former Levy chief deputy Paul Sabatino, filed papers in State Supreme Court in Riverhead. Also bringing the suit is the Long Island Environmental Forum, a political action committee that Amper helped form.

"They have broken faith with the voters and they have broken the law," said Amper, who will hold a news conference on their suit outside the county legislature meeting in Hauppauge Thursday.

The lawsuit challenges the legality of a compromise proposal adopted by the legislature in August that would allow the county to use excess sewer fund surpluses over $140 million the next two years to fund both sewer expansion and $20.5 million in tax relief in next year's budget.

Those bringing the lawsuit maintain that 1989 legislation funding the county's quarter cent sales tax program included specific language requiring a mandatory referendum if money was ever to be reallocated.

"The idea was to have an ironclad compact with the voters that could not be changed by the whimsical shifting of political coalitions," Sabatino said. He said language first appeared in that legislation after Democratic County Executive Patrick Halpin tried to raid the fund and was included five other times in subsequent extensions of the program.

Levy called Amper "a gadfly" and maintains that he is "dead wrong" on the law -- a position that both Levy's county attorney, Christine Malafi, and legislative counsel, George Nolan, support. He also said that many environmental groups were heavily involved in negotiations of the deal that also will provide $34.5 million to expand sewering that will protect the region's underground water supply, including grants for new high tech septic systems where sewering is not practical.

Backers of the sewer fund measure cite the recent New York City case where Mayor Michael Bloomberg was allowed to run for a third term, after the city council changed the law to lift term limits without a referendum. Sabatino, who drafted the original county law, maintains the difference is that the county statute specifically spelled out a requirement to hold a mandatory referendum, while the term limit law did not. Jennifer Juengst, a voters forum board member, another litigant in the case, said the groups brought the suit because "It's our responsibility to prevent elected officials from committing voter fraud by ripping taxpayers off."

But Presiding Officer William Lindsay (D-Holbrook) who helped broker the compromise to allowed the measure to pass, said if the suit is successful it will just add to the county's fiscal woes. "If they're successful, it will just make the layoff list longer," he said.