Legislator Joshua Lafazan (D-Woodbury) has proposed a resolution that would remove the names of all elected officials from county-owned signs and properties.
Lafazan’s proposal, which has little chance in the Republican-controlled Legislature, is clearly aimed at the excesses of County Executive Bruce Blakeman, a Republican, who has taken a page in self-promotion from Donald Trump by using taxpayer money to slap his name on virtually all things Nassau.
The latest example was in the promotion of a concert to honor Harry Chapin, a legendary singer-songwriter and advocate for the hungry who died in a fiery car crash on the Long Island Expressway in 1981.
The placement of signs with Blakeman’s name far larger than Chapin’s resulted in the organizers’ postponement of the concert.
Lafazan said in a release that Blakeman’s self-promotion began as soon as he took office when he reversed a policy from his predecessor, Laura Curran, not to use her name on county signage.
His goal, Lafazan said, “is to redirect taxpayer resources to more worthwhile endeavors by eliminating the need to produce and update hundreds of signs every two years or sooner based upon whom is elected to county office.”
This is not an argument without merit.
North Hempstead Supervisor Jennifer DeSena, a Republican, campaigned on a proposal to remove officials’ names from town signs two years ago for the same reason.
Blakeman’s excesses have certainly added to an argument to prohibit the use of taxpayer money by elected officials to promote themselves.
But we don’t believe removing officials’ names from all signs is the right thing to do. Nor does it remove some of the worst abuses of taxpayer money by officials.
Consider signs posted for infrastructure projects by the Biden administration.
They serve the purpose of informing the public of needed work done by the federal government and who is responsible.
This can help encourage elected officials who did nothing for decades to address the country’s deteriorating infrastructure to act in a more timely fashion in the future.
The effectiveness of this can be seen in Republican members of Congress who voted against the infrastructure bill claiming credit for projects built in their districts.
As they say, “Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.”
Besides, signage is just one way that elected officials in Nassau County, and virtually every municipality, take advantage of taxpayer money to promote themselves.
Take Lafazan. He is currently running for re-election in the county Legislature and has announced his intention to run for disgraced Congressman George Santo’s seat whenever that opens up.
His proposed resolution to remove names of elected officials from county-owned signs and properties was announced in a press release distributed by the Legislature’s minority caucus.
You can argue that Lafazan was proposing a solution to a real problem. Or that he was aiding his campaigns with a popular plan that had little or no chance of being approved. Or both.
County legislators of both parties also routinely send out taxpayer-funded mailers to their constituents.
The justification is that they are keeping their constituents informed on important issues The reality is that they are often little more than taxpayer-funded campaign literature.
Perhaps the most egregious in Nassau are legislators and town officials who hold free assessment grievance workshops.
On one hand, this is a valuable service to constituents due to a broken county system in which those who challenge the assessed value of their property usually end up paying lower taxes than those who don’t file a grievance.
On the other hand, these are some of the same legislators who have failed to fix the county’s broken system for more than 10 years.
According to a Newsday report, $2.7 billion in property taxes was shifted over the eight years in which no reassessment was done during the administration of County Executive Ed Mangano, a Republican, from people who challenged their property taxes to those who didn’t.
That’s a lot more than the cost of signs promoting public officials.
Laura Curran ran for county executive in 2017, pledging to fix the dysfunctional assessment system starting with a revaluation of every property in Nassau.
Curran kept her campaign promise and reassessed all the properties in Nassau County.
The new assessments, while not perfect, were found to be within every major professional standard of “accuracy and fairness.”
But this did not sit well with county Republicans and the more than 50 percent of property tax owners who had been, in effect, underpaying their taxes for eight years at the expense of those who didn’t challenge their assessments.
Republican legislators pointed to several miscues made in the rollout of the county’s reassessment system in calling for the referendum and the removal of County Assessor David Moog, a certified assessor appointed by Curran.
Never mind that Republican legislators offered no criticism during the eight years of dysfunction under Mangano.
Curran joined Republicans in seeking to soften the blow to property taxpayers who had been underpaying their taxes by phasing in the changes in reassessment over five years.
This, of course, meant that property owners who had made up for the underassessment of others by overpaying their taxes would continue to overpay their taxes for five years, but by declining amounts.
But the fix of the assessment was then put on hold by Curran, who froze assessments for the 2022-23 tax year during the COVID pandemic when house prices spiked in Nassau
Curran described the move as temporary until the heated housing market settled down after the pandemic only to extend the freeze for the 2023-24 tax year shortly before she left office without making any public announcement.
Blakeman had campaigned against Curran pledging to fix the county’s assessment system.
Upon taking office in 2022, he called for county Comptroller Elaine Phillips to conduct an audit of the assessment system.
Phillips’ audit found that Curran’s reassessment relied on “flawed” data that was out of date and reduced the value of some 23,000 properties at the last minute without justifying the changes.
Moog, who served as county assessor under Curran, noted though that “the tax roll that we put out was judged as one of the most accurate tax rolls in New York State.”
In February, Blakeman froze the tax rolls for the 2024-25 school year, keeping more than 385,000 residential properties at values last calculated in late 2019.
Did Lafazan and other Democratic legislators return the favor and attack Blakeman for his handling of the county’s assessment practices? Not at all.
Blakeman’s extension of the assessment freeze guarantees that the disparity in assessments is again rising – and the need for grievances workshops by legislators is increasing as is the demand for law firms that challenge assessments.
Law firms that challenge assessments made $500 million in fees from 2012 to 2019, the Nassau County Comptroller’s Office found in 2021
The Committee for Fair Property Taxes, a political action committee funded by heads of tax firms, donated $382,275 to Republican campaign committees, candidates and elected officials in Nassau County in 2022.
The committee gave $43,000 to Blakeman’s campaign, $8,000 in 2022 and $35,000 in 2021. The PAC gave the Nassau County Democratic Committee $6,500 in 2018 and $75,000 in 2019, state campaign finance records show.
The PAC gave $20,000 to Curran’s campaign for Nassau County executive in 2017.
We think the Legislature should put a hold on discussing the proposed ban on officials’ names from county signs.
Instead, we have a modest proposal. Post the disparity in assessed property values and list campaign contributions to the elected officials on all county properties instead.
