MINEOLA — Several years after layoffs led to understaffing in the Nassau County Assessment Department, our Nassau County Local recently helped secure money for new hires to alleviate the problem.
New Nassau County Executive Laura Curran wants to resolve an ongoing assessment issue that has led to disparity in the worth of residents’ homes.
CSEA Nassau County Local President Jerry Laricchiuta said the disparity can be traced back to the former Nassau County administration‘s decision to cut jobs, which led to understaffing and a drop in the quality of services.
Former Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano laid off our members in the Assessment Department in 2011 and he hired an outside contractor named Standard Valuations Services. “We won a subcontracting case against them and the county paid about a million dollars in fines,” Laricchiuta said.
Laricchiuta noted that our contract with the county notes that our members can’t be laid off because of outside vendors.
While our local has regained about 260 of the jobs lost in the 2011 layoffs, none of these positions replaced the 69 Assessment jobs that were lost.
“By that time, Mangano had changed the rules and decided to only assess properties every five to six years,” said Laricchiuta. “Our people in Assessment predicted that change would mess everything up and they were 100 percent right.”
Laricchiuta also noted that the changes could possibly lead to residents paying far different tax totals than their neighbors with similar properties. “You fast forward to today and you could be paying 30 percent more in taxes than your neighbor if you didn’t grieve your taxes,” said Laricchiuta.
The Curran administration decided to fix the problem — by planning to hire Standard Valuations Services, the same outside vendor that CSEA sued the county for working with after the 2011 layoffs.
“I read in the paper that they were planning to hire Standard Valuations again,” said Laricchiuta. “I called the county executive and told her that we already won an award based on the county using their services. [Curran] is adamant about fixing the assessment problem this year, so I suggested that she consider hiring part-timers.”
Our union’s goal was to re-staff Assessment to allow future assessments to be done in-house.
There were three weeks of intense negotiations between the local and the county.
“We were negotiating, right up until five minutes before the vote,” said Laricchiuta. “The county finally agreed that over two years, there will be over $2 million in base salary new hires, they must all be CSEA members and that they will never use an outside contractor again, after this contract.”
The result of CSEA’s successful negotiations will lead to savings for Nassau County because they will not have to pay yearly contracts to outside vendors. Plus, county residents will finally have fair assessments on their homes.
“We’re going to fix the assessment problem with our people in-house, so the people of Nassau County can have a fair tax rate,” said Laricchiuta.
— Wendi Bowie
