With apologies to Yogi Berra, it sure seems like "déja vu all over again."

Wasn't it just a few years ago that NIFA (The Nassau Interim Finance Authority) was created to monitor how Nassau County would handle its financial affairs after the prior administration had run it into the brink of bankruptcy? They had borrowed heavily not only to finance the cost of millions of dollars in property tax refunds but also to finance the most mundane costs of running a government. In fact it required a state bailout (a la NIFA) to keep things solvent. And doesn't it seem like just yesterday that the current administration was talking about how all those problems had been solved expeditiously, that the county's bond rating had been brought back from the dead and the savings in interest payments alone would fuel a new round of fiscal prosperity?

Bet you had a sneaky suspicion that this was all too good to be true, didn't you?

Welcome to the current state of affairs. It turns out that maybe there are some lingering problems with the affairs of the county after all. Judging by published accounts of the first full session of the new term of the Nassau County Legislature, these problems seem fiscal in nature, political in tone, and structural in fiber. Take for example what happened during the first meeting. As reported by Joyce Brown in Newsday ("Her silencing of Nassau lawmakers speaks volumes," Jan. 15, 2008), while a legislator was criticizing a proposal to have Nassau County take over three local sewer districts, the new presiding officer turned off his microphone (actually, all of the microphones of the legislators belonging to the opposition party, allowing only the Democratic legislators to be heard), triggering a screaming match. The county comptroller's office must also have had some apprehension about the sewer takeover, as it had asked the legislature to postpone a decision in order to gather more information on its financing. A group of residents who had collected 700 signatures, saying they had just heard of the proposal also requested more information before a decision was made. The director of the legislature's independent office of budget review sat in the audience, waiting to testify regarding the matter. NIFA itself had also requested more time because it needed to see more financial information. In the ensuing chaos, Presiding Officer Diane Yatauro put the proposal up for a vote. The Democratic majority voted and passed it, proving that machine politics didn 't get thrown out along with the old Republican bathwater.

Things certainly are getting ugly in the halls of government. All this was supposed to be a thing of the past. Money would be the salve to soothe political differences and quell the infighting that had come to characterize Nassau County government. And there would be plenty of it too, due to the reassessment. It was the perfect solution. Peg the taxes to the ever-rising home prices and take the taxpayer along for a ride he could not refuse. Unfortunately, all the money spent on the reassessment now seems to be another case of government waste, as the reassessment didn't bring about a fairer means of taxation, and may in fact prove to be the undoing of county government in the end. Wait until the county is hit with the decimated tax collections resulting from declining real estate values. Having already had to borrow to make property tax refunds, the county's financial future does look grim indeed. It may yet have to go back to financing its day-to-day operations by borrowing. Then again, they could just vote in an increased level of assessment.

Leave it to the politicians. They have their own way of problem solving. The methodology is to continually pursue higher office, while blaming the other party for the problems that go unsolved. But like they say, you ain't seen nothin' yet. After all, you know what's at the root of the problem, and it's just getting started. They better order the metal detectors now because there's no telling how hard they will be fighting over a smaller pie when the imminent storm hits the county's finances.

Nurhan Hamarat