Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, closing out his first year in office, has proven himself great at cutting ribbons, holding pressers (while not actually answering questions) and photo ops, congratulating high school sports teams, hosting feel-good concerts, but bad at actually doing something to improve residents’ lives. Window dressing, but no actual leadership or governance.

Crime is up, but apparently he doesn’t consider hate crimes, fomented by White Christo Nationalists an issue, though he did announce increased security for synagogues after the New Jersey online threat, making a great show with Orthodox Jews, including Great Neck Mayor Pedram Bral.

Crime is up, but his focus? Overturning New York’s revamped gun laws banning guns from sensitive and high-trafficked areas. He is keen to have people arm themselves in schools, synagogues, on the LIRR, in public spaces. (But not government offices – the Executive Building looks like an armed encampment as he surrounds himself with security.) His concern for “public safety” extends to warning residents against the risk of Christmas tree fires back in October, and announcing Breast Cancer Awareness Week, Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and Fire Prevention Week.

That’s all the more relevant since real public threats – coronavirus, flu and RVS, even polio – are on the rise in Nassau County, at rates higher than New York City, highest in the state, and higher than the nation.

Dr. Bruce Farber, chief of public health and epidemiology for Northwell Health, told Newsday it is vital for people to understand that being reinfected a second time with COVID-19 should be taken as seriously as a first infection. “There’s some data just coming out that suggests the rate of long COVID and complications is just as high with re infections as it was with the original infection. So I don’t think people should have a false sense of security that if they had COVID once, they are out of the woods because that’s not necessarily true at all.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul is actively urging New Yorkers “to take advantage of all available tools to keep themselves, their loved ones and their communities safe and healthy. Stay up to date on vaccine doses, and test before gatherings or travel. If you test positive, talk to your doctor about potential treatment options” – a message being reinforced with a public information campaign.

But what is Blakeman doing? Is Blakeman echoing the call to get vaccinations, boosted, wear masks, telling people where to go? Showing an example by getting the shot himself? Has he warned residents that even if they have already had Covid, they can get the new variant (so much for Trump’s ‘herd immunity’ strategy)? Is he reminding Nassau that the health insurance enrollment period is open? Of course not.

Blakeman is too interested in pretending all is well, all is normal. Well, the new “normal” is making pandemic precautions part of everyday life, not pretending, ostrich-like, that it does not exist.

Nassau’s new health commissioner, Dr. Irina Gelman, at a Blakeman photo op for Ukraine, said she would have to go back and review the statistics but that Covid, flu and RSV rates are up everywhere (it’s the winter holidays, after all) and that increases reflect more testing. But she did not mention any actual effort to urge county residents to get boosted, vaxed, or wear masks in public settings.

Requests for comment from Blakeman and Dr. Gelman were not answered by presstime.)

Blakeman is mining the resentment from segments of the county – such as Orthodox Jews – for the quarantine, mask and vaccination mandates imposed by a Democratic governor and a county executive at a time when New York was at the epicenter of the coronavirus and Covid was killing 2 million Americans.

Another issue that poses a threat to Nassau County is cyberattacks and ransomware such as have debilitated Suffolk County. Blakeman’s solution is to hire a contractor, presumably to evaluate vulnerabilities.

Despite the steady drumbeat of new revelations concerning Suffolk County’s catastrophic cyberattack, the Republican majority on the Legislature has yet to act on two proposals by Legislator Siela A. Bynoe (D-Westbury): to establish a separate, internal cybersecurity administrator and team within the Nassau County Department of Information Technology to focus on strengthening the county’s systems and developing recovery protocols in the event of an attack and to direct the Department of Consumer Affairs to give any future victims resources that they can use to protect their credit and alert the major credit bureaus of the exposure.

But Blakeman has basically frozen out Democrats from any actual deliberation for the betterment of the county – as in the pseudo “bipartisan” redistricting committee.

And by the way, Gov. Hochul back in February established a Joint Security Operations Center in Brooklyn to serve as a nerve center for joint local, state and federal cyber efforts, including data collection, response efforts and information sharing. The JSOC, the nation’s first-of-its-kind cyber command center, provides a statewide view of the cyber-threat landscape and improves coordination on threat intelligence and incident response.

The governor also proposed a $30 million “shared services” program to help local governments and other regional partners acquire and deploy high-quality cybersecurity services to bolster their cyber defenses.

Has Nassau County sought out this expertise and assistance?

So far, Blakeman has spent 98% of his time and effort on purely ceremonial things, maybe 2% on policy or actions that actually benefit Nassau County, improve people’s lives.

Blakeman ignores any proposal that comes from the Democrats and exiles every Democrat from public presentation, surrounding himself with Republicans and supporters.

Among the Republicans on hand for the Ukraine event at which Ukraine’s consulate general thanked Blakeman for Nassau’s gun drive to help the war-torn nation’s citizens, Republican Congressman-elect George Santo responded to a question about his Republican House leadership threatening to withhold aid to Ukraine, saying, “We don’t agree on everything in my caucus.”

Hardly a way to effectively govern. Hardly leadership. And with Republicans poised to gerrymander a supermajority on the county Legislature, that is the way it will be for a decade, at least.