Only in Albany

Daily Point

Two dumping tracks

Question: In what state capitol is it possible that two legislative houses controlled by the same party could push bills with the same goal and yet not end up with legislation?

Answer: You already know.

Only in Albany.

The bills, written by Long Islanders and important to the region, would create new crimes and penalties for illegal dumping, a scourge on the Island. But they are on a collision course because of their respective philosophical underpinnings. Both bills are expected to pass in their respective chambers next week, which then will require Senate and Assembly negotiators to come up with a compromise that would vex even Solomon.

Find out how they differ and more here.

—Michael Dobie @mwdobie and Randi F. Marshall @RandiMarshall

Talking Point

Coronavirus, county guarantee don’t mix

Since the day Nassau County Executive Laura Curran took office in January 2018, her oft-touted plan to address the broken property-tax assessment system was rooted in a few basic principles:

- Build an accurate roll.

- Defend that roll vigorously against unjustified appeals, while identifying and correcting the valid ones. 

- Adjudicate the appeals quickly to settle many of them before tax rolls must be set, typically on Aug.1. That would keep Nassau from having to pay refunds and be on the hook for overpayments to school districts and other municipalities that the “county guarantee” prevents Nassau from clawing back.

Curran told The Point recently that the vigorous defense of the roll she’d promised may not be possible for the 2020-2021 assessment, saying: “We are not at that point anymore, where we can do battle and fight it out.”

The problem is timing. When the coronavirus pandemic closed the courts, Nassau tax grievers who normally would have had the month of April to take appeals denied by the Assessment Review Commission to the next level, Small Claims Assessment Review, were stymied. 

The courts started accepting SCAR appeals online on May 25, and the county has pursued an aggressive mediation program to settle them. But those appeals have been slow to come in and tax certiorari attorneys have been slow to settle, most likely because canny operators know that if they run out the clock, the county will have to give in.

The SCAR appeal deadline was moved to Aug. 5 by the state, then Sept. 4. The courts are behind on reporting filings and adjudications, but as of last week, the county had received approximately 60,000 SCAR appeals and has reached agreement on 5,500, with 23,000 more settlement offers pending. That leaves more than 30,000 left to settle. And almost 85,000 taxpayers who, having had their appeals denied by ARC, still have a right to file this additional appeal if they choose. 

It was just such scary numbers that led former County Executive Edward Mangano to freeze the roll and begin settling almost all appeals regardless of merit in 2011. Before that drastic action, the county guarantee on residential tax appeals cost Nassau $20 million to $30 million annually.

With the pandemic crushing budgets and Curran projecting a $749 million deficit, county officials say they are looking for ways to get around the dilemma and defend the roll without incurring the costs, including asking the state to adjust the dates of some deadlines.

But as it stands now, those who take their appeal all the way to SCAR, and those who represent them, are likely to see Christmas come early, because the filing deadline came late.

—Lane Filler @lanefiller

Pencil Point

The daily stats

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Final Point

Building a better wind farm

The language in the news release was a bit abstruse. A Stony Brook University professor, it said, “proposes to optimize offshore wind farm layouts by leveraging high-fidelity simulations on parallel supercomputers, advanced turbine controls and Artificial Intelligence tools.”

Translation: He wants to build a better wind farm.

That goal resulted in a $1.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy-funded National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium to Professor Fotis Sotiropoulos, the dean of Stony Brook’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. And it further reinforced Long Island’s central position in the development of offshore wind in the Northeast.

“The big challenge to make offshore wind viable is to reduce the cost of energy,” Sotiropoulos told The Point. “There’s a lot of space for innovation.”

He’s been working on computer tools to design land-based wind farms for 10 years, but offshore wind farms present a different set of challenges centered on what Sotiropoulos calls their unique “turbulence.” That comes from the interaction between irregular winds and ocean waves, and the wake that is created behind every turbine that takes energy from the wind as it turns and reduces the wind’s velocity behind it. Since higher wind speeds mean more power, the trick is to place the turbines in position to harness the highest wind speeds possible while minimizing the turbulence that could cause turbine blades to crack.

Sotiropoulos will do that by pushing forward on the computer simulations he’s already developed, then feeding into those complex equations data on historical wind and wave patterns for a particular offshore area. That requires enormous computing power, which means he will be using Stony Brook’s supercomputers to virtually develop his wind farms.

The plan, he said, is to “give industry guidance before they build them,” which he called “an unprecedented opportunity.”

Norwegian giant Equinor, which won a state contract last year to build an 816-megawatt project called Empire Wind some 15 miles off the South Shore near Jones Beach, is his partner in the project and will be sharing data of its existing wind farms in Europe. Sotiropoulos plans to produce open-source software that would be available to the entire offshore wind industry, but he said that if a spin-off company is formed to work on specific projects, Stony Brook and the company would have to agree on how to license what would be intellectual property owned by the university.

“Before the industry can contract my computer design, we have to prove to them it’s accurate,” Sotiropoulos said. “We need to demonstrate that the computer tools correctly replicate reality.”

Sotiropoulos anticipates cost savings of 10% to 15%, or more, an answer that’s just blowin’ in the wind.  

— Michael Dobie @mwdobie