The Real Deficits of Nassau County

The Long Island county is wealthy, heavily taxed, and financially unhinged all at once. How one of the richest communities in the U.S. went broke

Andrew Hetherington

By Susan Berfield

Nassau is among the nation's wealthiest counties—and the richest in New York—as measured by per capita income. It has 1.3 million residents and a median household income of nearly $95,000. There are 37 private golf courses. It's the kind of place where a home might be listed for $25 million and described as "inspired by Marie Antoinette's Le Petit Trianon." Even the Garden City Water Works is housed in an elegant, medieval-looking brick building from the 1870s.

It is a generous place, too, and the salaries of its town and county workers reflect its good fortune. Two school superintendents are the best paid in the state, earning about $380,000 each. Starting salaries for public librarians are as high as $63,000. A county policeman with eight years of service earns a base salary of $108,000. The 2011 budget for the Hempstead animal shelter includes $3.25 million in salaries for 38 employees.

Not surprisingly, it is an expensive place to live. Property taxes are close to $9,000 on average, the second highest in the U.S. after New York's Westchester County.

It is also broke.

On Jan. 26 the six members of the Nassau County Interim Finance Authority, or NIFA, a nonpartisan state-appointed commission, announced that, for the second time in a decade, it would take control of the county's finances.

Nassau's elected officials, led by County Executive Edward P. Mangano, had insisted that everything would be just fine. "The more he did that, the more he showed people he doesn't have a grip," says E.J. McMahon, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute's Empire Center, a fiscally conservative think tank. "There's been too much smoke and mirrors," says George J. Marlin, a NIFA director. "The day of reckoning has finally arrived."

Nassau has its peculiarities, including a confounding tax refund system that has left it more than a billion dollars in debt. But its real deficits are easy to understand. "Nassau is an extreme example of our national problem. We want to have things and we don't want to pay for them," says Robert B. Ward, deputy director of the Rockefeller Institute of Government. Nassau isn't the first rich community to get into financial trouble, and it won't be the last. Which means that there could be other NIFAs, too—outside advisers brought in to help fix what local politicians can't or won't. "The message is: 'Watch out, this is the way it works,' " says McMahon.


In Nassau, the man elected to lead the county toward recovery has argued for the past seven months that the only problem is NIFA. "The deficit is in their minds, not in reality," he says.

That puts Mangano, 49, in the unusual position of having to figure out how to close a $176 million gap he doesn't think exists. A native son, Mangano is accustomed to the contradictions of public life in Nassau. He graduated from Hofstra, a local university; owned a small printing business; and worked as an attorney for the firm Rivkin Radler, one of the largest on Long Island. He lives ten miles from where he was born.

After 14 years as the Republican legislator for the district that includes his hometown, Bethpage, he narrowly and unexpectedly won the election for county executive in November 2009. His campaign centered on one promise: He wouldn't raise taxes. That earned him the backing of Nassau County's small but energetic Tea Party and helped him unseat two-term incumbent Democrat Tom Suozzi.

Mangano's office is on the second floor of the "Suozzoleum," which is what Republicans call the Theodore Roosevelt Executive and Legislative Building in Mineola, after Suozzi, who authorized and oversaw its $63 million, six-year renovation. It's a quiet, almost sterile place. Visited on a Friday afternoon in late February, just after control of the county's money was wrested from him, Mangano wears a sweat jacket and jeans. He's graying, burly, and didn't seem entirely at ease seated behind his large wooden desk. A copy of George Washington's Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation was perched on one corner. "I shouldn't have been so cooperative," he says of his dealings with NIFA. "It's a power grab intended to discredit and embarrass the administration, the Tea Party, and the Republican Party."