Suffolk County shouldn't kill public financing before the fact 

Just as the Suffolk Campaign Finance Board is finally ready to get up and running, with the aim of opening up elections a bit more, leaders of the county legislature are moving to defund it. A hearing on repeal held Tuesday is slated to be followed by a vote by the full body June 22.

Presiding Officer Kevin McCaffrey and other leaders of his five-month-old GOP majority say they’d rather use the $2.5 million budgeted for public campaign financing for other purposes. They say they don’t want public funds to go to candidates and campaigns not all taxpayers support.

It's the wrong choice.

For a quarter-century, the introduction of public campaign financing has received popular support. Suffolk County voters chose overwhelmingly at the polls, in bipartisan fashion, to introduce such a system back in 1998, but it vanished along with other planned governmental reforms. 

This time around, the board and its earnest executive director, Mercy Smith, were moving to finally implement the reform by working on procuring software that will track contributions and campaign expenditures in a coherent and meaningful way. That's an improvement on its own.

In public hearings, Smith has made a disciplined case against repeal. She refrains from any unrealistic promise of getting all special-interest manipulation out of elections. Rather, she testified that providing matching funds to candidates that leverage small donations — as successfully done in some other jurisdictions — “has a potential to mitigate” some of the problem.

We agree.

The new system was delayed by the pandemic, and rescheduled for the 2023 legislative and county executive races. There has been no new referendum asking voters to decide again whether they want public campaign financing. Only the party of the legislative majority has changed.

Public campaign financing has always seemed worth a try, to even the playing field and encourage new candidacies for county office. The $2.5 million on the chopping block here would be minuscule in a multibillion-dollar budget, funded by 15% of the county's share of the proceeds from video lottery terminals of Suffolk's Regional Off-Track Betting Corporation at Jake's 58.

Perhaps the most salient pitch for salvaging the effort comes from Republican Legis. Robert Trotta, widely known for his criticism of the outsized influence of Suffolk’s Police Benevolent Association. If public service unions were less able to influence county politicians through contributions, Trotta suggests from his current perch as Ways and Means committee chairman, the public could already have saved hundreds of millions of dollars on bloated contracts.

If this resolution pushed by Deputy Presiding Officer Steve Flotteron and Legis. Dominick Thorne is approved as expected, County Executive Steve Bellone should veto it.

Bellone has supported public campaign finance for Suffolk this far. He has no reason to give up now in the face of unreasonable legislative resistance.