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LI Herald

January 21, 2007

 

The Taxing Islands

 

Long Island on a map looks like one big flat fishy slab, but maps are deceptive. Politically, it's an archipelago: a chain of hundreds of governmental bodies, all separate and independent, and all floating in a sea of taxes.

The proliferation of overlapping taxing districts -- counties, towns, villages, hamlets, fire departments, school systems, sanitary districts -- has left Long Islanders in a trap. They love the amenities of multiple governments but ache under the burden of paying for them all. The cost of living here keeps rising in ways that seem beyond anyone's control, since things like garbage collection and gleaming firetrucks, while expensive, are also seen as essential. Or, if not essential, then at least immovable. In many cases the taxing districts have become politically tenacious fiefdoms: secretive, highly fortified and resistant to siege.

People like to complain about the problem, but it took the Nassau Comptroller, Howard Weitzman, to sink his watchdog's teeth into it. Last month he issued a report highlighting ways that the more than 200 special taxing districts in Nassau -- whose total tax bill was more than $473 million last year -- can save large amounts of money.

But not, he says, by dissolving themselves or consolidating with other districts. These options have often been suggested, most recently by Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who wants to create a Commission on Local Government Efficiency to study the problem across the state, which has more than 4,200 taxing districts. Instead, Mr. Weitzman proposes smart trimming around the edges of the problem by imposing greater oversight and by pooling resources.

The first line of defense against special-district overspending -- watchful voters -- is faulty, since special-district elections are obscure rituals in which only the tiniest sliver of the electorate participates. So Mr. Weitzman suggests that town governments step in to control spending. As he interprets state law, towns have the authority to review the budgets of special districts, to compel them to justify expenses and to trim their budgets as needed. Two of Nassau's three towns -- North Hempstead and Oyster Bay -- have already begun doing so. The third, Hempstead, should join them.

Mr. Weitzman's report outlines common-sense ways districts could band together to reduce insurance costs, pooling their risk through group self-insurance and saving money that would otherwise be spent unecessarily on brokers' fees and redundant contracts with private insurance companies. The same cooperation could apply to buying goods and services in bulk, or contracting with town governments for services like snow plowing and tree pruning at rates cheaper than those charged by private companies.

If there was ever any doubt that special-district spending could be tightened, it was shattered in 2005. That was the year Mr. Weitzman conducted eye-opening audits of sanitary districts in Nassau, finding numerous examples of wastefulness and lack of oversight, and Newsday published a series of articles detailing the sometimes grotesquely lavish spending by volunteer fire districts across Long Island. Mr. Spitzer's commission has not yet gotten off the ground. When it does, it would do well to take a page, or several, from Mr. Weitzman's report.

 

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