‘Surgery without anesthetics’
Harendra Singh leaves federal court in Central Islip after a hearing on Oct. 5, 2015. Credit: James Carbone
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Pointing Out
A 401(a) idea
The tiny police department of Huntington Bay Village is dialing back the enormous retirement payouts officers receive in unused sick and vacation time.
A new four-year contract requires officers to bank unused vacation time annually in a 401(k)-style fund — actually, a 401(a) — and caps sick-time accruals at 120 days instead of 180.
It’s a small department — just four full-time and 20 part-time officers. However, if these terms were applied to the larger Suffolk County force, the county would save millions of dollars a year, says Dom Spada, the village police commissioner and an unsuccessful candidate for county legislature last year.
In the past, village officers could accrue 90 vacation days to be paid on retirement. The new contract requires credit for unused time to be placed in the retirement fund at current rather than future wages.
Spada said he told his officers that investing now in a retirement account is a good deal because the stock market is doing well.
As for sick time, in the past, officers could receive 180 days upon retirement, but the officers’ union voted to reduce that by one-third. In exchange, the department agreed to pay a total of $40,000 to bump the officers into a better pension category. They had been in a plan called 384-d, which pays a 50 percent pension after 20 years. Now, the department is offering a 375-i plan. When an officer reaches age 55, with 25 years of service, he or she can expect a pension of 61 percent of salary.
The $40,000 for the entire department is payable over 10 years, Spada said. The contract includes raises of 2 percent in the first two years, and 3 percent in the second two years. Starting pay is $51,000, and it rises to the top level of $118,000 after 8.5 years.
E.J. McMahon of the fiscally conservative Empire Center for Public Policy threw a bit of cold water on what Spada sees as his department’s achievement. “It’s probably some modest savings, I suppose,” he said. “But how many people accrue vacation or sick time at all? Police on Long Island get gobs of service pay; this is serving the gobs with a different size spoon.”
Asked whether he’s building up to challenging Legis. William Spencer again, Spada said he doesn’t have any plans yet to do so.
Anne Michaud
Pencil Point
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Daily Point
Could Singh have saved the Islanders?
Testimony in the federal corruption trial of former Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano, his wife, Linda, and former Oyster Bay Town Supervisor John Venditto showed how hard Mangano tried to keep the New York Islanders in the county.
In July 2012, Mangano turned to restaurant owner Harendra Singh, who arranged a meeting among Mangano, Hempstead Councilman Edward Ambrosino, and Barry Edelstein of Structured Growth Capital, according to testimony Monday in the trial.
The goal? To determine whether the county could get financing for the Coliseum, possibly guaranteed by revenue from the Coliseum’s naming rights.
But a lot more was going on in Mangano’s effort. That same month, Mangano released a request for qualifications, seeking a developer to remake the Coliseum and build on the 77 acres around it. The request sought a renovated or new arena, a convention space, biotech park, retail and housing. The winning developer, the request said, would “immediately begin negotiations” with the Islanders to attempt to retain the team.
The RFQ came after a referendum to build a new Coliseum with public funds failed in August 2011, and Mangano spent much of the following 12 months intensely focused on plans to get the team to stay, plans that included, apparently, his meetings with Edelstein.
By the end of July, several developers had submitted plans for the request for qualifications, including the eventual winner, Plainview developer Donald Monti. At the time, Monti said he was committed to finding a way to keep the Islanders in Uniondale.
But, according to Edelstein, the key question of private financing “kind of just fizzled out” after a couple of meetings. After that, Mangano had almost no other options. Less than four months later, Islanders owner Charles Wang held a news conference in Brooklyn, announcing plans to move the team to the Barclays Center. Monti’s RFQ proposal never went anywhere, and by 2013, a new request for proposals was issued — one that developer Bruce Ratner and his team eventually won.
Relying on Singh to be the dealmaker to keep the Islanders didn’t break any laws, but if it did, Mangano would have good grounds to assert an insanity defense.
Randi F. Marshall
Talking Point
Cuomo gets a nod
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s re-election campaign got an endorsement Monday from Ritchie Torres, a rising-star city councilman who represents parts of the Bronx.
Torres published a Daily News op-ed praising Cuomo as “a political master in the tradition of Lyndon Johnson,” including this colorful line: “The leadership of Andrew Cuomo is a little like surgery without anesthetics: painful to those on the receiving end but effective at doing the people’s work.”
The council is not normally seen as a hotbed of pragmatic politics, so it might seem surprising that Torres went with Cuomo over leftist challenger Cynthia Nixon. But Torres, a 30-year-old legislator who heads a news-making council investigations committee, has been establishing his independence from Mayor Bill de Blasio and other progressive peers.
He left the body’s Progressive Caucus last year over disagreements about police reform compromises. This year, he has repeatedly slammed the de Blasio administration for its handling of the troubled New York City Housing Authority. And he has defended Cuomo’s new attention to NYCHA world: Fine print in a recent Cuomo executive order puts NYC on the hook to pay for certain repairs. Torres tells The Point that more money spent on NYCHA is a good thing: “How is that a problem?"
Torres says that he wrote the op-ed himself and didn’t inform the governor’s office he’d be writing it. Explaining his endorsement, he says some criticism of the governor seems “blinded by hatred,” ignoring the value of “competence” to get things done.
No word yet, though, on whether Cuomo will take up Torres’ “surgery without anesthetics” line.
Mark Chiusano
