Nassau should welcome NIFA audit of assessments

In 1999, Nassau County’s financial picture was grim.

The county had racked up nearly $3 billion in debt; its deficit had reached $300 million. Nassau’s county executive at the time, Thomas Gulotta, had spent years mismanaging the county’s budget. Among the many issues: The county borrowed just to pay back the endless stream of property tax grievances resulting from a broken assessment system.

With the county verging on bankruptcy, Gov. George Pataki in 2000 created the Nassau Interim Finance Authority, a fiscal watchdog dedicated to resolving the county’s financial troubles and setting it on a better course. In brighter times that followed, the state authority served as a behind the scenes adviser. But since 2011, the county has returned to what is known as a "control period,” where NIFA has a more powerful, active part in county budgeting, finances, contracting and labor agreements.

Now, 26 years after the agency’s creation, Nassau County is no longer near insolvency — thanks in part to the constant presence of NIFA.

Earlier this year, NIFA began an audit of the county’s long-troubled assessment system. Assessment has been one of the county’s most impactful and intractable concerns since those troubled Gulotta days, continuing through the tenures of Tom Suozzi, Edward P. Mangano and Laura Curran, as each tried to find answers. In his 2021 campaign, County Executive Bruce Blakeman promised to “fix” the assessment system, though he never provided any details on how such a repair would work. Since then, Blakeman has only frozen the tax rolls — a far cry from a “fix.”

NIFA’s decision to hire independent auditors to examine whether the rolls are “accurate and equitable” was necessary. But the county has since refused to cooperate with those auditors, declining to even meet with them for a standard opening conversation. This has delayed the audit, which was originally to be completed this summer. Meanwhile, Blakeman has clashed with NIFA on other fronts. In April, he tried to unilaterally declare the authority’s control period over while lacking legal authority to do so. And when Blakeman finally did meet with NIFA officials last week, the short conversation was reportedly contentious and unproductive.

None of this is helpful to Nassau taxpayers, who must continue to deal with the ramifications of a broken assessment system, and who face perpetual uncertainty in a county whose precarious finances and ongoing budgetary gimmicks still require strict oversight from the state watchdog — regardless of Blakeman’s resistance.

Blakeman has long promised to stand with those taxpayers, to do right by them. If he means that, he should welcome NIFA’s spotlight on the assessment system — and do all he can to cooperate with the authority and its outside auditors. A full audit can only help illuminate the system’s shortcomings and point out potential solutions. Perhaps it would even provide Blakeman with the “fix” he’s been seeking for five years.