The following appeared on Monday, October 18, 2021 on The Island Now’s website:

Before appointing a senior officer to command troops, Napoleon Bonaparte would ask his confreres, “I know he’s a good general, but is he lucky?” The lucky officers, he believed, seized unexpected opportunities in battles that would lead to victory.

 

In a similar vein, Nassau County Executive Laura Curran has been pretty lucky on the political battlefield these past four years.

 

When Curran sought the county executive post in 2017, she was lucky that Republican incumbent Ed Mangano, was under federal indictment for 13 counts of fraud and bribery. Mangano’s top deputy, Rob Walker, was also under investigation. (Later, both were convicted of various crimes.)

 

In the September 2017 Democratic primary, Curran had the good fortune to run against the hapless County Comptroller, George Maragos. The wealthy Maragos had switched from the Republican Party believing he could buy the Democratic nomination. Maragos proved the adage that one cannot “make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

 

In a hotly contested fall election, voters, weary of GOP corruption, narrowly elected Curran with 51 percent of the vote.

 

Curran inherited a government that was under the thumb of the state control board, the Nassau Interim Finance Authority, due to Mangano’s fiscal incompetence.

 

NIFA declared a control period in 2011 because Mangano’s fiscal policies—that included borrowing to balance operating budgets—were leading the county to financial insolvency.

 

Unlike Mangano, Curran seized the opportunity to work with NIFA to solve the county’s fiscal woes.

 

Curran’s luck held. Thanks to Republican federal tax cuts and the subsequent roaring economy, Nassau’s operating deficits, based on Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, began to decline.

 

In fact, Curran’s 2019 budget incurred for the first time in years a GAAP operating surplus of $76.8 million.

 

Curran weathered the COVID pandemic in 2020 by effectively controlling expenses, particularly the payroll. And she was lucky; federal COVID relief money—albeit one-shot revenues of $102.9 million—helped the county incur a GAAP surplus for the second year in a row.

 

So far this year, the county’s finances are in pretty good shape. Sales tax revenue is way ahead of projections and the County, NIFA reported, has received “$397.7 million in new federal aid from the American Rescue Plan Act, which will be split equally between fiscal year 2021 and fiscal year 2022.”

 

NIFA is projecting a budget surplus for the third year in a row. And it is possible NIFA will be able to lift the control period.

 

Curran is also lucky because the Republicans have put up against her an awful candidate, Bruce Blakeman—the Harold Stassen of the Nassau GOP.

 

Who was Stassen you ask?

 

Stassen (1907-2001), a Republican, was elected to one term as Minnesota’s governor and went on to lose a record-breaking number of elections.

 

He unsuccessfully sought the GOP nomination for president eight times, lost elections for governor three times, U.S. Senate two times, and Congress once.

 

Like Stassen, Blakeman has lost a slew of elections. In 1999, voters booted Blakeman out of the county Legislature after voting to raise taxes 16 percent and for supporting budgets that were funded with hundreds of millions of borrowed dollars.

 

Blakeman also lost a race for state comptroller in 1998, receiving only 32 percent of the vote.

 

In 2010, he never got to the starting gate to run against U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. He was soundly rejected by both the Republican and Conservative parties.

 

And in the 2014 election, Kathleen Rice easily beat Blakeman in the 4th Congressional district.

 

The lucky Curran should easily beat the ill-fated Blakeman.

 

But will Laura Curran’s luck hold out?

 

During a second Curran term, the economy will eventually slow down, consumer spending will decline and inflated residential real estate values will spiral downward.

 

To prepare for the economic turndown, Curran should have abandoned the election year $375 homeowner rebate gimmick. She should have dedicated those one-shot dollars to pay off tax certiorari claims and to flood rainy-day funds.

 

By failing to seize the opportunity to effectively utilize the county’s financial windfall, my guess is Curran’s luck will run out during the next four years.

The following appeared on Monday, October 4, 2021 on The Island Now’s website:

Last month a reader’s letter to the editor characterized me as “parochial” because I oppose legislation that would empower federal or state bureaucrats to override local zoning laws.

The reader is correct, I am “parochial.” But I do not consider it a pejorative label.

I am parochial because I agree with the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s observation that the theory “you can run the Nation from Washington … at least … with respect to the kind of social change liberals generally seek to bring about” which pertains to “social attitudes” is “false.”

I subscribe, as Moynihan did, to the social concept known as “subsidiarity” which champions parochialism.

The principle of subsidiarity affirms that decisions are most appropriately made by municipal and social entities closest to the relevant issue and by the next highest entity when decisions and actions are beyond the scope of those at a lower level.

Hence, the national government is the proper agency to wage war; the family is the proper agency to raise children.

People depend on one another: first upon their parents and then upon friends, neighbors, teachers, employees, etc. Individuals and families naturally broaden their associations to meet their needs in “subsidiarity.”

According to the noted sociologist Andrew Greeley, subsidiarity means “no bigger than necessary” and by structuring life according to this principle, “one can protect, promote and defend the freedom, the dignity, the authenticity of the individual human person.”

Incidentally, subsidiarity is the foundation of Catholic social thought.

In his 1930 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (The Social Order), Pope Pius XI defined subsidiarity as “the fundamental principle of social philosophy, fixed and unchangeable, that one should not withdraw from individuals and commit to the community what they can accomplish by their own enterprise and industry.”

Pope John XXIII re-enforced his concept in Mater et Magistra (1961):

The state should leave to these smaller groups the settlement of business of minor importance. It will carry out with greater freedom, power, and success the tasks belonging to it, because it alone can effectively accomplish these, directing, watching, stimulating and restraining, as circumstances suggest or necessity demands. Let those in power, therefore be convinced that the more faithfully this principle be followed, and a graded hierarchical order exists between the various subsidiary organizations, the more excellent will be both the authority and the efficiency of the social organization as a whole and the happier and more prosperous the condition of the state.

Moynihan agreed with this papal teaching, as I do, because he realized that subsidiarity “occupied a middle ground between the radical individualism that grew from classical liberalism and the statism that evolved from both continental socialism and conservative absolutists.”

In fact, in a speech Moynihan delivered at a conference in 1975, he chastised progressives for rejecting papal teachings on subsidiarity:

Now a century earlier—just to keep matters complicated—such papal doctrine would have been seen as the embodiment of liberal principle! But by 1963 this was no longer so. To the contrary, American liberalism was at the very moment about to enter a period of unprecedented attachment to whatever it is that is the opposite of the principle of subsidiarity. The state was encouraged to take over more and more individual functions, and the highest levels of the state were encouraged to take over more and more of the functions of the “lesser and subordinate levels.”

Like Moynihan, I do not believe federal or state governments should micromanage local issues by overriding or stripping supervisory powers of local magistrates.

Hence, consistent with the principle of subsidiarity, I oppose state regulation of local zoning laws.

But, on the other hand, I oppose Garden City magistrates holding up LIRR Third Track project work permits for the replacement of the Denton Avenue Bridge.

The project is beyond the purview and competence of Garden City officials. Because the project benefits commuters throughout Long Island, decision making rightfully belongs in the hands of a higher government entity, the Metropolitan Transit Authority.

If my positions on these issues are “parochial,” so be it. I wear the label with pride.