Not on my fence 

Daily Point

The signs they are a-changin’

If you happened by the edge of the old Liotta Recycling Center in Oceanside last Friday, you’d have easily spotted three posters displayed on a high fence, advertising the candidacies of three local Republicans on November’s ballot.

The posters touted Don Clavin, seeking reelection as supervisor of the Town of Hempstead; Laura Ryder, seeking reelection to the town’s 4th district council seat; and Patrick Mullaney, who’s running for the local Nassau County legislative seat to succeed retiring veteran Legis. Denise Ford.

Nothing seemed odd on the surface — except if you considered that the GOP candidates have voiced opposition to the Equinor company’s plan for offshore wind turbines and that Equinor nowadays just happens to own the former Liotta property.

The very next day, on Saturday, a fourth sign joined the campaign posters attached to the fence. It was the biggest of the group, declaring in white letters against a bright red background: “This property is owned by EQUINOR.” 

And what do you know: By Sunday, the three Republican signs were gone. Photos supplied to The Point, taken in one-two-three sequence, outline the changes. 

Presumably, the Republican candidates didn’t want any voters to get the idea, from this sudden change in the visual array, that the Norwegian-based utility company was somehow sponsoring them. Equinor has been fighting to fend off what it calls fiction, myths, and misinformation about the alleged downsides of the project — some of it contained in recent Republican candidate mailings.

But just who posted the posters, how Equinor came to visually state its claim, and why the posters were quickly removed, adds up to one of those little unknowns of the still-young political season.

— Dan Janison dan.janison@newsday.com

Pencil Point

Two for one deal 

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Final Point

Retirees’ health coverage faces a reckoning

Key concessions on health insurance for retirees have been baked into the Civil Service Employees Association’s new 13-year contract with Nassau County. Now some employees are voicing anger and alarm that they are left without recourse for the breach of a verbal promise they’d counted on as a big condition for their employment and their life planning.

The contract, already ratified by the union’s members, goes before the full county legislature on Wednesday. In a public Finance Committee hearing last week, four staffers at the county’s Health Department appealed for a fix to their health-retirement letdown. They noted a number of employees in other agencies also are adversely affected.

Under previous agreements, anyone who left county employment after 10 years’ service would get full health insurance benefits upon retirement. But under the new CSEA contract, those same employees would need to wait until they’ve worked a full 20 years before they'd be eligible for the retirement health benefits. The change is effective June 30, 2026. It does not provide for older employees to retroactively claim the benefit for which they first signed on.

Kathy Mucerino of Seaford said she was hired as a Health Department administrative staffer in July 2020, “a couple of months before turning 59.” Nobody on the job was led to believe they couldn’t leave after 10 or 15 years of service with full benefits, but suddenly, she’d have to work until 81. She called this abrupt change “unrealistic” and “ridiculous.”

Vivian Sasson of Merrick, also at the Health Department, testified: “When I came to the DOH, I had a big decision to make. Not only was I overqualified for the job that I took, I was also getting job offers for substantially more money. I decided to take the lesser pay, owing to the fact that I would, at 10 years, have my health insurance in retirement.”

“I didn’t take the job right away. I was pursuing the human resources department, asking over and over again, if this is the benefit I will be receiving and they said yes,” Sasson said. “Our union let us down and allowed for benefits to be taken away from us. They could have asked us or grandfathered it in or asked us to pay toward it until we made our 10 years. There were so many ways around it.”

Another health insurance change stirring concern among employees is that under the new contract they will have no choice but to take the NYSHIP Excelsior Plan for their coverage. Currently, they’ve been able to choose the NYSHIP Empire Plan, which has some differences.

These givebacks from labor are part of a complex new CSEA deal that includes gains for employees on other fronts, including annual raises between 2 and 3% retroactive to 2020, sign-on bonuses, and stipends.

Among the other concessions are a two-day reduction in annual leave, a cap on termination pay, and 15 minutes added to the workday. 

Despite these savings for the county, the CSEA pact is projected to boost county personnel costs by a net of $149.8 million annually as of 2030.

The Nassau County changes echo in some ways a wider-ranging controversy involving health coverage for New York City retirees. Some of those who have had their Medicare covered for many years since retirement were told they must shift coverage to a Medicare Advantage plan. That resulted in a lawsuit in which a judge forestalled any change — citing a city administrative regulation enacted decades ago to protect the level of long-promised benefits.

Like pension costs, health coverage costs have mounted into an ongoing fiscal dilemma for many municipal governments, and the long-brewing fiscal tensions are surfacing.

— Dan Janison dan.janison@newsday.com

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