Dawidziak: Monday is no day for a vote

Michael Dawidziak is a political consultant and pollster.

The vote on the Nassau Coliseum referendum is in five days, yet many of the details are still shrouded in mystery. Voters are being asked to authorize borrowing $400 million to build a new coliseum. They have a right to know all the details before being asked to go on the hook for such a huge amount.

The first thing a voter might ask is why the vote is on a Monday in the middle of the summer.

Election days -- be they generals, primaries, school board votes or whatever -- are generally held on Tuesdays. This is deeply rooted in the American tradition of voting. The second question is, why schedule it for the middle of summer, when so many people are away on vacation -- and the rest certainly aren't paying attention to politics.

Referendums of this importance should be placed on the November ballot -- as they almost always are -- to ensure the largest number of voters have a say in the matter. You want to know with confidence that the vote truly reflects the will of the majority.

Suffolk County voters have approved several referendums to tax themselves to protect drinking water, and these votes have occurred on Election Day in November. That means supporters can say this truly was the will of the people. On the flip side, some municipal special districts hold their elections on days other than a Tuesday -- in all months of the year -- and the turnouts are abysmally low. The cynical conclusion is that the votes are held when supporters feel they can best control turnout.

Two recent polls -- one by Newsday/Siena Research Institute and one by my company, Strategic Planning -- have found that voters feel it's important to keep the Islanders here and for the team to have a new venue, but they don't want to pay for it. In the Strategic poll, 53 percent said they supported the project, while 38 percent didn't (9 percent were undecided). Some 64 percent thought it was important for the Islanders to stay in Nassau.

But when it comes to borrowing the money, only 30 percent were in favor, while 55 percent said no (15 percent were undecided).

A big part of the voters' reluctance to borrow the $400 million can be attributed to Nassau's overall debt picture. As anyone who has ever gotten a mortgage knows, the price to pay back a loan is far greater than the original face amount. The payback cost in this case will be more like $800 million. If the county's municipalities were debt-free, this might not be such a hard thing to ask the voters to support. But with the county deep in the red, you can't blame taxpayers for saying, "Enough is enough!"

The major question is whether the voters have been educated enough on this issue to vote on it. When former County Executive Tom Suozzi pursued the development of the area with the Lighthouse Project, he did it through governmental and business channels. The people weren't asked to vote on that project, but arguably they knew much more of the details than they do about this deal. If you're going to run a representative form of government by plebiscite, than the voters need to be properly educated on the facts before being asked to vote.

Yet even the county comptroller, George Maragos, after studying the deal, can't say he has enough answers to give it the thumbs up or not. If the comptroller doesn't have all the information, how could the voters?

Islanders owner Charles Wang, who has been trying for almost a decade for a new or renovated coliseum, has blamed some of his past and present problems on politics. "If the Democrats like it, then the Republicans have to not like it; if the Republicans like it, the Democrats can't like it." He's right about one thing. There's a lot of politics surrounding this deal. But ultimately, it's about whether the voters like it or not -- and if they have all the facts to know