Dan's Papers - March 28, 2008 - Another Reason Why We Need Peconic County Now

You may have heard that about six months ago all five of our East End towns filed a lawsuit against Suffolk County saying they were not getting their fair share of what was being collected.

Specifically, the suit involved the money earmarked for police departments. You shop in a store and the County takes taxes. Then, a certain percentage of it is supposed to be paid out to the police departments. Last year that was $110 million.

What are the police departments in the County? Well, as you probably know, the western half of the county is very different than the eastern half - 1.3 million people live in the western half, which is all housing developments and shopping malls, and 160,000 live in the eastern half, which is farmland, summer homes, fishing boats and tourists.

On the western end, all the towns and villages voted 50 years ago to combine all their police departments into one big Suffolk County Police Department. While here on the East End, the villages and towns elected to keep all their little police departments. So there are 12 of those - five towns and seven villages. The County Police come in here by invitation only.

How to divide up the money? The County divided it up based on population. So $100 million went to the County Police and $11 million went to the East End police to be divided up for the 12 different little police forces.

Now the East End probably could make a good case that they are getting the short end of the stick here. Not only do we bring in three times as much money per capita in sales tax as the West End does, we have about ten times the assessed evaluation per capita. In every way, we really do get the short end. Except that the County is mandated to do "one man one vote" and not "one tree one vote."

In any case, one of our East End Legislators, Jay Schneiderman, last year discovered that as far as the police allocation is concerned, not only is the East End getting the short end of the stick, but we aren't even getting that.

There is a law on the County's books that says how this police money should be divided up. When Schneiderman did the math he discovered that the share going to the East End was about $1 million short of even the pathetic little sum we get. We were getting $10 million a year, not $11 million like we were supposed to.

Schneiderman felt it was his duty to point all this out to the County Executive Steve Levy, and to request that this be fixed on a go-forward basis. But Levy ignored him. Schneiderman then asked that Levy look at what had happened over the last ten years and when he ignored him again, Schneiderman did the math for him. Over the last ten years, the West End had shorted the East End $10 million.

Schneiderman wanted the money back. He suggested it be made up to the East End over time, but again Levy ignored him. And so finally, along with the 12 eastern municipalities, a lawsuit was filed. The County should be made to follow its own law. It was sad, but a judge should rule on this matter.

Schneiderman completely underestimated Levy. One week ago, Levy proposed to change the law so that instead of it reading that he divides up this money based on a formula, he would henceforth be free to divide it up as he saw fit. If he felt like giving the East End $8 million for their police departments, it would be $8 million. Or if he felt like giving them only 50 cents, it would be 50 cents.

The ingenuity of this change in the law would mean that on a go-forward basis, Levy would no longer be in violation of the law. And on a practical level, it meant that even if the judge ruled that the $10 million was owed, Levy could simply decide that next year he would give the East End towns nothing. And then $10 million he was required to pay would just be instead of what he used to pay.

I spoke to Schneiderman about this the night before the vote. "Basically, Levy is saying if you don't like it, watch, it's going to get worse. I'm doing everything I can to gather up council people to see that this vote does not pass. You know, we are only two East End legislators. There are 17 from the West End."

He almost made it. On Wednesday at 4 p.m., the County voted 10 in favor of screwing the East End and 8 in favor of keeping things the way they were. He'd lost.

So the next time you buy something in a store, just consider as you add the 8 7/8% sales tax to your bill, that how much of that comes back to you as money for our police departments is at the whim of Steve Levy, our wonderful County Legislator who lives on the West End.

Several times in recent years, the five eastern towns of Long Island, tired of being the whipping boy for the more populous West End, have tried to organize a new county. It would be called Peconic County, because each of the five eastern towns, East Hampton, Southampton, Riverhead, Southold and Shelter Island, share a shoreline of that body of water.

Dan's Papers has been all for founding a county to manage our own affairs. We've held contests to design a Peconic County flag. We've urged readers to put the plan on the ballot as a referendum and they did, but then it has always been shot down when it gets to Albany.

Early on, the problem was that we were just shy of the minimum number of people to form a county. Dan's Papers urged people to procreate, and they did. So now our numbers have swollen to well above that minimum. More recently, we actually got to the desk of the Governor and the State Legislature.

There, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, to his great discredit in my opinion, rounded up enough state legislators to vote our plan off the ballot by the simple expediency of telling them that if they didn't do so, then certain pork barrel projects they could expect would be withheld. And so they complied. This is what passes for democracy in Albany.

The truth is that the East End is one of the wealthiest communities in the country. We don't go out and buy $99 winter coats at Kmart. We go out and buy $999 winter coats at Saks Fifth Avenue. And the sales tax on all that adds up and it goes west to Suffolk County and Levy, who gives the vast majority of it to the poor, or relatively poor folks of the West End, if you can call the moderately heeled folks of the West End poor.

I suppose there is something to the doing of that. But he never asks our opinion about this. And why should he? The West End outnumbers us 17 to 2.

I do not blame Schneiderman for what happened with this vote last week. He's here to represent us and do the best he can for us. And he has a right to expect that the County will obey its own laws, not change the law so they don't have to.

"Apparently, we're supposed to be grateful for the few crumbs they throw," Schneiderman said to me. "I think it's time to roll out those Peconic County flags again. And this time, we should make it happen. We would be financially so much the better for it."

By the way, after the County changed the law, Sag Harbor voted to withdraw from the lawsuit. Turncoats are what they are. Let's leave them out when we form Peconic County.

And now there is more news. Jay Schneiderman has worked out a compromise with the West End legislators. The new bill, just voted through, will not be turned into a law after all. Or at least not just yet. Instead, a six-man committee will be created, with three members nominated by Schneiderman and three by Levy, to study this situation and by May they will come up with a solution acceptable to all. It's kind of half a rabbit pulled out of a hat, somewhere between a delay and something fair, which until now, we have not got.