Curran mailers send bad signal

In her 2017 run for county executive, Democrat Laura Curran savaged the use of county-funded political mailers by Nassau politicians. She argued that such mailers, if they’re county-funded, should be strictly informational, and the name of the politician sending them should appear only once.

Both arguments made sense: taxpayers shouldn’t have to fund slanted messages, and truly informational fliers don’t need to repeatedly name the source of the information. Factual information that explains office hours or county programs or park regulations, for instance, doesn’t need citations. It’s when the message is open to interpretation or the point is political promotion that the need to keep stating the sender’s name crops up.

So now Curran is taking heat for a mailer she sent to 465,000 households, at a cost of $99,467, touting the plan she has implemented to fix the county’s assessment mess after a decade of frozen rolls and growing inequity. The mailer also advocates for the five-year phase-in she’s pushing to soften the blow of big tax payment increases for residents whose assessments are unnaturally low, often due to annual appeals.

Her name appears on the mailer four times. And it’s not strictly informational, because the phase-in it paints as a benefit to all will cost almost half of them more money than doing reassessment without the phase-in.

Curran’s phase-in is the right move. It tempered the assessment plan and made fixing the system politically possible. But the phase-in means people who have not been appealing, and who have thus been overpaying, will continue to overpay for years.

An “informational” mailer would have explained both sides of the phase-in’s effect, rather than just touting it as all positive to get residents to push legislators to pass it.

Curran knows it’s inappropriate to use public funding for such a mailer. She’s the one who pointed out the problem.

— The editorial board