Letters

Posted

Our kids and their cellphones

To the Editor:

Randi Kreiss’s column “And we did it all without smartphones” (Sept. 15-21) was spot on. People today are too connected for independent thought. When we sent our children to school, we let them deal with any incident in their own way. How else could they prepare for the future, when they would have to make decisions for themselves?

Nowadays there is constant intervention, so the first steps of separation cannot occur. Remember when there was only one phone in a household? Even with extensions, there was only one number. Electronics have their role, but we over-use them. If everything is done for us, what’s the role of the human being?

Thanks, Randi, for another good column.

Mary Schwarz

Long Beach

County should reject sewage deal

To the Editor:

In a rare move, the Nassau County Legislature’s Rules Committee tabled a proposed contract with KPMG, for which the firm would investigate possible refinancing of county and sewage debt as part of a deal to lease Nassau’s sewage treatment plants to a financial firm.

Would refinancing the sewage debt be a good deal for the county government? Yes. Who wouldn’t want nearly a billion dollars that didn’t need to be repaid? Would it also be good deal for the financial conglomerate that won the bid? Yes. Who wouldn’t want a guaranteed rate of 4 to 8 percent in fee increases every year from county residents?

Refinancing, however, would be a horrendous deal for Nassau taxpayers, who would incur new debt of historic proportions, which they would have to repay to a private enterprise in their monthly sewage bills.

This would be another way to take money from overtaxed Nassau residents without calling it a tax. It would be a back-door sewage tax hike.

At the same time, South Shore residents living near the Bay Park and Cedar Creek sewage treatment plants would remain at risk under the deal, because improvements to the plants would not be part of it.

In 2012, when Nassau officials first contemplated this back-door borrowing, Bloomberg News reported the potential deal as the “biggest one-shot ever for a New York municipality.” The Nassau Interim Finance Authority rejected the Morgan Stanley contract in 2012 and the KPMG contract in 2015, and the Legislature’s Rules Committee tabled it. No matter how many times county officials try to tweak the terms, it’s still the same deal, and should be rejected for the same reasons.

 Dave Denenberg

Merrick

Director, LI CAWS