Letters: Nassau GOP doing friends favors
John Ciotti, right, GOP candidate for the Nassau County Legislature, talks to Angeli Chara and Conetta Cardon in Franklin Square. (Nov. 8, 2011) Credit: Newsday/Karen Wiles Stabile
Newsday's editorial "The party takes care of its own" [Jan. 6] soundly and appropriately chastised the Nassau County Republican Party (and chairman Joseph Mondello) for engineering the appointment of former County Legis. John Ciotti to the job of general counsel at Nassau University Medical Center, with a substantial raise in salary and a solid opportunity for monumental retirement benefits. All this while County Executive Edward Mangano struggles with the Nassau Interim Finance Authority to bring the county's flailing budget under control.
Ciotti has no experience in health-care regulation and would be hard-pressed to differentiate between a frontal lobotomy and a bed pan. But this has been the history of the Nassau County party's patronage policies for decades. Under the hammer-hand arrogance of Mondello (with the muted approval of the Conservative Party), the policy has been carried to a new low.
In February, with much disapproval from veterans, Mondello engineered the appointment of Michael Kilbride Sr. to run the Nassau County Veterans Service Agency.
While the Democrats certainly followed similar patterns of patronage, nepotism and cronyism, it is the Nassau County taxpayer who suffers the greatest. It is time the taxpayer received the best bang for his or her buck and qualified people were hired to perform the work, not the party faithful. Many good and decent employees of Nassau County have been given their pink slips so that Mondello could keep his powerful grip on the Republican Party.
Gene Clark, Rockville Centre
Editor's note: The writer is a co-organizer of the Nassau County Tea Party Patriots.
I want to commend Newsday for the editorial on the patronage attorney appointed to the Nassau hospital. This editorial hit so many points of corruption in Nassau, which I thought people just didn't talk about, much less put in print.
At the risk of violating copyright laws, I am (possibly) inspired to make 500 copies and distribute it around the county buildings on Old Country Road and Roosevelt Field.
I dislike Nassau for its combination of greedy, garish consumerism at one extreme, and its know-nothing middle class. Then there is the pervasive odor of its public corruption. All that comes in a big package of gleeful arrogance, pushiness and sanctimony. Aside from shopping, dysfunction is all around.
Richard Brummel, Greenvale
