Suozzi's Shell Game

The shell game is a famous con trick where the con artist hides the shell through deft manuevers and slights of the hand. Tom Suozzi's gotten to be a master of the shell game. And he's using YOUR money to play it.

Suozzi's taking money from one account, moving it to the other and getting on the soapbox and claiming 'I FIXED NASSAU.' But we know that isnt true. And here's his game.

Here's an example. Suozzi tried to lay off all of the police mechanics and the hire them back at a lower rate. That's illegal and failed. So, he simply took the money from their budget, and moved it somewhere else. That's got to be illegal too, but the bottom line is simple. The money is being moved around. No one knows where its going. Is it going to fund the performance bonuses for county employees who spend their time handling the Suozzi machine political business (as detailed in the Morganstern case)? Or is it going to fund other stuff, like the 400 something patronage employees larding the payroll?


It makes you think. The county's in bad shape. Yet Tom's shifting money around trying to prevent disaster. How is that for transparency and open government? Suozzi needed money a few years ago, so he told the Assessor, his good friend Harvey Levinson to jack out assessments. So now, if you're living in a house worth 500k, the county thinks its worth over 700k! Amazing, isn't it.

But I'm truly worried about the next big thing. Consolidation. Suozzi's sitting on a bankrupt county. He needs money. When you're desperate and attention hungry, you start trolling around for money.

Suozzi thinks he's found a nice chunk of change in something called the special districts. Special districts are something that make Long Island special. Home rule. Local control. Direct democracy.

The special districts include villages. Villages control local zoning, and are staffed by none other than local residents who care about the community. Villages bring goverment closer to the people.

The special districts include the firehouses that form an integral part of the community. Suozzi and his friend in Albany, Pedro Espada and David Paterson, want to close those down too and merge them to form super districts. Super districts won't be able to offer the same localized and individual responses that we need in Long Island.

And finally there are sanitation districts. Suozzi claims, without any evidence to support him, that they are bastions of waste and patronage. He might as well claim that they are staffed by unicorns and Abominable snowmen. Special districts are staffed by hard working people. People who care about the community. In fact, they do their jobs much more efficiency and at a much lower cost than the county itself.

Suozzi or the special districts? I chose the special districts in a heartbeat. I chose the dedicated employees, rather than the embittered and angry County employees who go through the motions while cursing their bosses for laying them off and slashing their salaries to the bone. I chose the dedicated commissioners -- who for a small salary devote hours of their time to their jobs -- over a full time spoiled brat of a CE who devotes 98% of his time to touring the state selling snake oil, raising money from contractors and groveling for a new job rather than 100% of his time running the county he is paid to run.

This November, let's send a message to Taxing Tom Suozzi. We want home rule and local services, not pay to play, unbridled ambition, misuse of government resources, cronyism and taxation. Let's elect a real executive -- Ed Mangano.