Editorial

Ticket surcharge is just another revenue scheme

Posted

Nassau County is in a perpetual state of financial crisis. For decades, its expenses have outpaced its revenues.

Elected officials tout the cuts they make to downsize county government. They insist that they are tough during union contract negotiations. Still, Nassau never has enough money. Ever.

The reason is simple: County officials are loath to raise taxes to meet expenses, even by the smallest amount. Every year, inflation rises, so expenses increase, leaving the county with one budget hole after another to fill.

That explains why County Executive Ed Mangano is proposing a $105 surcharge on all parking and traffic tickets. Under the plan, the red-light camera ticket that would have cost you $50 would suddenly be $155. The $110 fine for making an illegal turn would be bumped up to $215.

With the county writing upward of 600,000 tickets annually, the surcharge could bring in as much as $64.4 million a year, according to officials. That’s a lot of money –– enough to fund 150 new police officers and 81 civilian police personnel, such as 911 operators.

But we fundamentally disagree with the surcharge, for several reasons.

First, a surcharge on parking tickets? Really? Parking tickets are often written in the county’s numerous downtowns, full of mom-and-pop shops, many of which are just eking by. Our villages already have a hard enough time attracting customers to their downtowns, with their limited parking. Now the ticket that would have cost you $75 would become $180. Most folks would perceive the very possibility of being slapped with such a penalty as reason enough to shop online or at the mall.

Second, this idea is the latest manifestation of an unsustainable modus operandi. With relatively few exceptions, county officials have relied in the past on the so-called “one-shot” –– sell an asset here, sell another one there –– to raise revenue. The trouble with one-shots, however, is that there are only so many of them to go around. There’s only so much county property that officials can sell off, and only so many services they can privatize.

So, in recent years, Mangano has increasingly relied on what many describe as revenue schemes to fill the county’s coffers. His predecessor, Tom Suozzi, instituted red-light cameras to boost revenue in 2009. Now, every time motorists run camera-equipped lights, they are automatically ticketed $50.

In 2014, Mangano took the whole camera-ticket thing one step further by installing school speed-zone cameras throughout the county. People rebelled. They’d already had enough of the red-light cameras. The school-zone cameras sent them over the edge. Only months after instituting the cameras, Nassau nixed them. The scheme was a disaster that left the county with a multi-million-dollar budget hole that had to be filled with borrowing.

Even if people had accepted the school-zone cameras, history has shown that such revenue strategies are unreliable. As soon as drivers become familiar with where the red-light or school-zone cameras are, many of them start to avoid those streets. They find alternate routes. Ticket revenue drops, and the budget holes persist. A similar scenario would likely unfold if the county adopted the ticket-surcharge plan.

Mangano has said that the surcharge is necessary to help fill the Nassau County Police Department’s ranks. If he is truly interested in shoring up our police force, then he should commit to a sustainable revenue stream — namely, a modest property-tax increase. In this way, the burden would be shared by all, not just by shoppers and motorists, and the county could rely on the revenue under all circumstances.

Finally, we don’t like the idea that the surcharge would fund the police, who would be writing the tickets. That would create something of a conflict of interest, it seems to us. If the police wanted more officers and better pay –– and why wouldn’t they? –– they would have to write more tickets. There would be greater pressure on them to meet quotas to ensure that revenue projections were met.

Once again, we see county officials playing their annual budget shell game. They hit us with exorbitant fees and then tell us that they aren’t raising taxes. That’s simply not true. They’re attempting to raise taxes through backdoor methods, and that practice has to stop.