Andrew Hetherington
By Susan BerfieldNassau is among the richest in the country - and richest counties in New York - measured by per capita income. It has 1.3 million inhabitants and an average income of households nearly $ 95,000. There are 37 private golf courses. This is the kind of place where a home could be listed for $ 25 million and described as "inspired by the Petit Trianon of Marie Antoinette." Even the Garden City Water Works is housed in an elegant, medieval brick for the 1870s.
It is a generous place, too, and the salaries of its employees of the city and County of reflect his good fortune. Two principals are best paid in the State, earning approximately $380, 000 for each. Starting salaries for librarians in public libraries are as high as $63,000. Police County with eight years of service earn a basic salary of $108,000. Budget 2011 for the refuge for animals Hempstead includes 3.25 million in wages for 38 employees.
Unsurprisingly, this is an expensive place to live. Property taxes are approximately $ 9,000 on average, the second most high to the United States after the County of Westchester, New York.
It is also penniless.
January 26, six members of the County of Nassau, or NIFA interim Finance Authority, a non-partisan commission appointed by the State, announced that for the second time in ten years, it would take control of the finances of the County.
Representatives elected from Nassau, directed by County Executive Edward P. Mangano, had insisted that all would be well. "More was done, more people he showed he is not a grip," said E.J. McMahon, senior fellow at the Center of the Empire, a think tank conservative Manhattan Institute financially. "There was too much smoke and mirrors,", says George j. Marlin, a Director of NIFA. "The day of reckoning finally arrived."
Nassau has its peculiarities, including a confounding tax refund system which left it more than a billion dollars of debts. But its real deficits are easy to understand. "Nassau is an extreme example of our national problem." We want to have things and we do not want to pay for them, said Robert b. Ward, Deputy Director of the Rockefeller Institute of Government. Nassau is not the first rich community of financial trouble, and it will not be the last. This means that there may be other NIFAs, too - external advisors introduced to correct that local politicians are not or not. "The message is:"Beware, this is the way it works,""McMahon, said."".
In Nassau, the man elected to lead the towards recovery, the County has supported over the last seven months that the only problem is NIFA. "The deficit is in their spirit, not in reality," he said.
That puts Mangano, 49, in a situation unusual to have to find how them a gap of $ 176 million, it don't think that exists. A native son, Mangano is accustomed to the contradictions of public life in Nassau. He is a graduate of Hofstra, a local University. owned a small printing company; and worked as a lawyer for the firm Rivkin Radler, the largest on Long Island. He lives in ten kilometres from where he was born.
After 14 years as the Republican legislature for the district which includes his hometown, Bethpage, he closely and unexpectedly won the election for the Executive county in November 2009. His campaign focused on a promise: it would not raise taxes. Who has won the support of the Party of the County of Nassau, small but energetic tea and helped to unseat two-term Democrat outgoing Tom Suozzi.
Office of the Mangano is on the second floor of the "Suozzoleum", which is the only Republican call Theodore Roosevelt Executive and the Legislative Building in Mineola after Suozzi, who authorized and oversaw its $ 63 million, six-year renovation. It is a quiet, almost sterile place. Visited a Friday afternoon in late February, just after the control of the currency of the County was ripped him, Mangano is a sweater and jeans jacket. It is the aging, burly and seemed not entirely comfortable sitting behind his desk wooden. A copy George Washington rules of civility & Decent behaviour in company and conversation was perched on a corner. "I shouldn't have been so cooperative," he said of his relationship with NIFA. "Is a power to discredit and impede the administration, the Tea Party and the Republican party."
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