Suffolk County budget Bellone's top task

In many ways, the mountainous task facing newly inaugurated Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone is uncomfortably similar to the one that Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano has been bearing for two years: a broken budget, a county government deeply in need of restructuring, and the challenge to align union pay and benefits with fiscal reality.

At the start, Bellone has some advantages over Mangano, a former county legislator. He enters the job with nine years of executive experience as supervisor of Babylon, where he negotiated successfully with public sector unions. He also has a strong staff directly under him, with a broad range of experience.

And he has a legislature so relieved by the departure of former County Executive Steve Levy that he can reap at least initial good will.

But in amending Levy's 2012 budget, the legislature has handed him the conundrum of what to do about 600 county jobs that are funded only through the first six months. Further layoffs, beyond the 88 the legislature allowed, are a stark possibility. And the tears last week in Nassau over Mangano's 265 layoffs are a grim reminder of what Bellone faces.

To mitigate or avoid that, Bellone will need help from the county's unions, including the Police Benevolent Association, which supported him in the campaign. He'll have to do all that with the sharply reduced executive staff that the legislature handed him in its budget.

Bellone will have to be shrewd and tough, even with allies like the PBA. He'll have to rethink county government, scrape off the budgetary barnacles -- programs that have grown incrementally over decades, without serious zero-based re-examination -- and do a systematic overhaul, rather than tinker around the edges.

One good sign is his choice of Fred Pollert as his deputy for finance and management. For decades, Pollert has toiled over Suffolk budgets. He headed the budget review office for the legislature and was Levy's top budget aide before going to work for the Long Island Power Authority, then retiring. He has studied Levy's 2012 budget deeply, and finds it fundamentally shaky. Pollert gives the rookie team day-one expertise.

The first months will be about resolving the layoff crisis, figuring out the real size of the deficit -- which Bellone said at his inauguration Friday will likely be a "sobering" number -- and discovering the county's true revenues and expenditures. Levy blamed a recent downgrade of Suffolk's credit rating on the changes the legislature made to his budget. But there's another possibility: The revenues outlined to the rating agencies were delusional. To shore up the county's fiscal credibility, Bellone has to sort it all out.

Beyond the initial crisis, his long-term task is to deliver what he promised in his inaugural speech: making sure that services get delivered efficiently and taxpayers don't have to subsidize inefficiency with higher taxes. For that task, his approach -- performance-based, data-driven analysis of government -- is in sync with Pollert's.

In the process, county government will get smaller. It's Bellone's job to make sure the cutting is wise. It won't be easy, but it must be done.