The 2025 Nassau County budget is full of financial holes that continue to put the county’s fiscal well-being at risk, according to a report by its oversight board, the Nassau Interim Financial Agency.
Next year’s budget, proposed on Sept. 16 by Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman’s administration, contains “several significant risks” that may “threaten the county’s long-term fiscal stability,” NIFA’s 28-page Oct. 22 report stated.
These risks include overestimating revenues and underestimating costs, not budgeting for possibilities like economic downturns or emergencies, not following legally mandated generally accepted accounting principles, and over-relying on one-time federal stimulus money that the county was given because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
NIFA — a nonpartisan board established by the state in 2000 to help bring Nassau back from near-bankruptcy after irresponsible budget management — projects a deficit of up to $207 million next year, which may grow to more than $345 million by 2028.
Even that is without the added labor costs that will likely come into effect when unions strike new collective bargaining agreements with the county after their contracts end in June 2026, which will only serve to widen the already significant deficit.
The Blakeman administration points to keeping property taxes flat in the budget as a sign of fiscal health, and a selling point for the majority-Republican Nassau County Legislature.
But this only serves to shroud the deeper-lying problems in the county’s financial well-being, said Minority Leader Delia DeRiggi-Whitton (D-Glen Cove).
“Their (NIFA’s) findings corroborate our conclusions about how the county executive is continuing to spread a false narrative and create illusions about Nassau’s fiscal health,” DeRiggi-Whitton said. “When, in fact, his plan is riddled with obvious budgetary holes that could cause ballooning deficits in the future.”
Blakeman did not respond to requests for comment.
Nassau would have ended the 2024 fiscal year in a deficit if not for the one-shot infusion of money from the American Rescue Plan Act, that President Joe Biden passed in March 2021 to help local and state governments stay afloat during the pandemic.
The administration used those funds to “mask” the county’s structural financial imbalance in 2024, the NIFA report said. Those imbalances continue in the proposed 2025 budget and through 2028, but are more obvious without the ARPA money to hide behind.
The budget proposes using $30 million of fund balance every year from 2025 to 2028 to bridge the gap between its projected revenues and expenditures that would otherwise result in a deficit, but this is not allowed under GAAP, which the county must follow by law.
It’s “extremely troubling,” the report said, “and a sign the county remains fiscally challenged.”
Multiple county spending habits have been called into question over the past year. The Legislature approved along party lines — with Republicans supporting and Democrats objecting — $10 million of COVID relief money to be spent on Nassau’s 125th anniversary celebrations. Blakeman justified the expenditure, saying it would increase tourism to the county.
Further, the Nassau County Attorney’s Office more than doubled its spending on outside counsel over the past three years, from a little over $6 million in 2022 to more than $14.5 million this year.
NIFA unanimously passed a request for proposals so a firm could audit the county attorney’s office, which has “potentially shown a lack of management,” the request said.
NIFA was created to bring Nassau back from the brink of insolvency, which it found itself in, in part, because of increased spending by the county attorney’s office, then-Republican Nassau County Executive Thomas Gulotta’s refusal to raise taxes, and relying on a property tax assessment system that used outdated data, according to mid-2010s retrospective reports.
Today, Nassau has frozen its property tax assessments for four straight years.
Ultimately, the NIFA report said, the county can manage some of these risks by dipping into its reserves, but some problems are so glaring that they “raise doubt whether the county can navigate the long-term headwinds if the economy significantly declines.”
The Nassau County Legislature is scheduled to vote on the budget on Oct. 30.
