In 1999, when Blakeman served as the presiding officer of the Nassau County Legislature, the county faced a fiscal crisis and near-insolvency due to years of profligate spending and mismanagement. Blakeman, who now poses as a tax-cutter and champion of law enforcement, was the sponsor of county budgets that increased property taxes by 3.5% in 1998 and by an additional 9% in 1999. With Blakeman’s support, the 1999 budget cut more than $4 million from the police department.

As a result of the fiasco, voters handed control of the county Legislature to Democrats in the 1999 elections. Blakeman was defeated. The next year, the state put Nassau County into a form of receivership via the creation of the Nassau Interim Financial Authority, a financial control board that still supervises the county’s finances 25 years after the crisis Blakeman helped create.

In 2001, Democrats won complete control over a county whose government had long been dominated by a Republican Party machine.

Blakeman ended up back where he started: He secured a seat on the Hempstead Town Council, where he had previously served in the early 1990s. After unsuccessful bids for Congress and even mayor of New York City, he returned to county government in 2021, winning the race for county executive by less than a percentage point. And he resumed the same fiscal mismanagement that resulted in his defeat in 1999.

Blakeman promised to fix the county’s dysfunctional property tax assessment system. Instead, he undermined the prior administration’s attempt to reassess properly the values of all the real estate in the county and reinstituted an assessment “freeze,” guaranteeing that values would be incorrect because they are not regularly updated. That same practice helped destroy the county’s finances in the 1990s.

As county executive, Blakeman has done nothing to restrain spending. Despite his misleading campaign rhetoric, he has never cut a penny in county taxes. He misspent federal COVID aid to keep the budget afloat, money that is now exhausted. He disguises taxes as exorbitant “fees” charged for basic services, like recording papers in the county clerk’s office. And unlike Suffolk County, Nassau has refused to refund drivers for red light camera ticket surcharges that an appellate court has declared illegal.

The county’s public hospital, the Nassau University Medical Center, has lost hundreds of millions of dollars annually and projects a $167 million deficit for 2026. The hospital’s debt exceeds $1 billion, at least $100 million of which is guaranteed by county taxpayers. But Blakeman allowed the hospital’s management to degenerate into a bizarre circus overseen by one of his largest campaign donors.

In 2025, the state Legislature was forced to reform the hospital’s board to reduce Blakeman’s number of appointees. Instead of cooperating with the state to save the hospital from bankruptcy, Blakeman has refused to appoint any members to the newly constituted hospital board.

Bruce Blakeman’s public record is a tally of fiscal ineptitude that belies his campaign rhetoric. He is not a fiscal conservative. He has never cut a tax. Yet he now masquerades as a tax-and-spend hawk, saying he can reduce income taxes and cut utility rates “in half on day one” — promises that are nonsensical in a state where both houses of the Legislature are dominated by Democrats. His campaign, like his career, is built around empty cliches.

Sadly, Blakeman’s presence at the top of the Republican ticket is a disservice to his party and the voters of the state who seek a credible alternative to Gov. Kathy Hochul.

George J. Marlin, a Nassau County resident, served as a director of the Nassau Interim Finance Authority from 2010 to 2014. He is the author or editor of 14 books, including “Fighting the Good Fight: A History of the New York Conservative Party,” “The Guidebook to Municipal Bonds,” “Squandered Opportunities: New York’s Pataki Years” and “Mario Cuomo: The Myth and the Man.”