We won't get fooled again

We'd like nothing better than to report on a good, solid, issues-based campaign for town offices this election year. There are plenty of important issues to debate.

Instead, we're being treated to mudslinging and name-calling. And it's not even Labor Day yet. I shudder to think what might be in store for us in the home stretch of this campaign season, when things traditionally get ugly.

Both sides are guilty of this to some degree. But this is one realm where Brookhaven Republicans will never be outdone, and, true to form, they're proving themselves again this year.

The DiCarlo campaign issued press releases this week. One announced a radio ad campaign and the other blasted Brian Foley for taking a $10,000 corporate donation in violation of state election law, which limits such donations to $5,000.

According to the press release, the radio ads accuse Foley of trying "to use our tax dollars to support illegal aliens." They also blast him for an "outrageous property tax increase" and "out-of-control spending."

"Brian Foley won't fool us anymore," the ad claims.

No, from now on Robert DiCarlo will be fooling us.

For instance, he's asking voters to believe the town can reinstate the John Jay LaValle "tax holiday" that jeopardized Brookhaven's financial standing with the Wall Street bond traders.

He's also taking credit in the ads for being a "proven tax cutter." When asked to back up that claim, his PR guy (a veteran Republican negative campaign "handler") said DiCarlo, as a state senator from Brooklyn, "supported" Gov. George Pataki's budget.

Message to Jesse Garcia, Frank Tassone and Robert DiCarlo: Negative campaigns, devoid of substance, don't work when you've got a candidate of substance on the other side, fellas. It's a lesson you should have learned from the Grucci, Manger and Zanzi campaigns.

Voters are not stupid.

Neither are newspaper reporters.

Jesse Garcia told us the GOP financial disclosure on file with the state Board of Elections shows an incorrect bottom line due to technical difficulties with the software. The committee's treasurer was working on resolving it. Nearly a month later, same bottom line. What's up? Garcia told me last week he didn't follow up on it. Right. The state BOE spokesperson told us that agency has no record of any "technical problems" with its software that affected the Brookhaven Republican Committee's filing.

Robert DiCarlo, who is happy to pick apart Brian Foley's campaign disclosure report ("Why is this builder [E.W. Howell Co.] so interested in raising money for Brian Foley?" he asked the Sun), didn't bother to file his own disclosure report with the state, as required by law. (The July periodic disclosure report was due July 16, in electronic format, for filing on the state's Web site, for all to see.) He said he filed a report on paper with both the state and the county BOE. The state agency told us this week it had no record of any such filing. In fact, their spokesman said, the state BOE sent DiCarlo a warning letter about missing the filing deadline.

DiCarlo told the Sun he couldn't file electronically with the state because he was waiting for the state BOE to issue him a new identification number and he couldn't file electronically until a new number was issued. Not true, says the state BOE. And if DiCarlo filed a paper report with the county BOE, it's not scanned and posted on its Web site yet. (The political hacks at the county BOE are too caught up in their respective parties' political shenanigans to be worried about the public interest.)

DiCarlo did provide the Sun with a copy of the paper report he says he filed with both elections boards. We've posted that on our Web site (along with Foley's) so voters can view the reports themselves, as the law intended. Enough with these silly games.

Interesting thing is, DiCarlo, who said he couldn't file electronically with the state because his current campaign committee needed a new state ID number, this week did electronically file a report: his JANUARY periodic report — which was due Jan. 15. And guess what? The committee is using the same ID number.

DiCarlo might not want to make his disclosure forms public because they're a mess: hand-printed, barely legible, missing essential information — including, even, some donors' names. (There's a $1,000 donation from some unnamed individual.) The law requires the report to list names and complete addresses for each contributor.

The DiCarlo disclosures also show "outstanding loans" from the candidate to the campaign committee, for loans he says he made to himself in mid-2006 for "campaign expenses." What campaign was that, we wonder? The report also shows a loan repayment to the candidate of $7,500 for a loan it says was made by the candidate to the committee in 2005. There's no way to verify that, because there are no DiCarlo reports on either the state or county Web sites for 2005 or 2006 prior to period covered by the Jan. 15, 2007, periodic report.

We've learned the hard way that nobody really scrutinizes these campaign disclosure reports. Candidates and elected officials have recently been caught using their campaign funds as personal slush funds — or worse. Some state senators have allegedly invested campaign funds in businesses doing business with the state. That's a matter under investigation by the Albany district attorney. The point is, nobody is really taking a hard look at these. We invite you to do so yourself at www.northshoresun.com.

Of course, it's right to question why certain businesses and the people who own or run them make hefty contributions to candidates for office (particularly incumbents running for re-election.) There's no doubt it's part of the process of "greasing the wheels" for themselves or their clients. And that's part of what's wrong with how our political system functions — and part of the argument some people make for public campaign financing.

In an interview this week following his press release blasting Foley for accepting a $10,000 check from a corporation, in violation of state election law (a check that the Foley campaign returned per a May 29 letter it wrote to the donor), DiCarlo said, "Everybody in this business knows what the rules are." As a veteran politician and former elected official, you know what the rules are too, Mr. DiCarlo. Why don't you follow them?

Copyright 2007 Times/Review Newspapers

Long Island's death by taxes

Tallgrass The magnitude of it takes your breath away. Set in the context of the lot lines of surrounding properties and roadways, the Tallgrass PDD map makes your jaw drop. At least it did mine.

Three hundred seventy-eight homes, 175,000 square feet of retail space, and an 18-hole golf course set on 320 acres. High density but “smart” development, at least according to proponents who say the overall environmental and economic impacts of the 283 single-family homes the developer could build as-of-right under current zoning. A Hobsian choice.

Small wonder many Shoreham residents were clamoring for the government to buy the land for preservation, and why Shoreham Councilman Kevin McCarrick tried to maneuver a moratorium to give the preservation effort time to bear fruit.

Is preservation the right thing for Tallgrass? I’m not so sure. Public funds for preservation are scarce and must be spent according to a well-thought-out plan that prioritizes properties according to objective criteria — which, in the best of all worlds, shouldn’t include “not in my backyard.”

When it comes to development, we’ve gotten a lot wrong on Long Island. We’ve carved this place up into large lots and built big homes surrounded by a lot of lawn, kept green and pretty by high doses of fertilizer and pesticides. We’ve shunned public transportation, and made being a pedestrian a life-threatening endeavor. We’ve constructed “The American Dream” on this fragile spit of barrier beach, and we’re learning that the dream is, in some ways, more of a nightmare.

Astronomical property taxes stalk us in our nightmare. Taxes have driven businesses and people off Long Island. They’ve made it hard to hire qualified employees from other places. I speak from hard experience in this. I lost a great editor because he got fed up with his $12,000 annual property tax bill. In his new home in the Midwest, he’s got a bigger house and his property taxes are around $2,000. I lost the opportunity to hire, over the past couple of years, two great editors — one from Virginia and one from Missouri — because of Long Island’s property taxes. Both were flabbergasted by the amounts we have to shell out every month to pay property taxes around here. Their tax bills now, they told me, are under $2,000 a year, an amount that would at least triple if they came to work for me here on Long Island. As an employer, I’m struggling to be able to pay employees enough to afford to live here. And it hurts.

Taxes, taxes, taxes. They were the talk of the town at the Republican convention last week. The Republicans, who arrived at the convention in cars bearing “Hi-Tax Foley” bumper stickers, would have us believe that property taxes were invented by Brookhaven Democrats. But there isn’t a thoughtful person alive on Long Island who would buy into that oversimplified poppycock. (Advice to Brookhaven Republicans: Don’t insult the voters’ intelligence.)

Property taxes — along with electric rates — are indeed killing us. Most of the property tax burden (around two-thirds) is the tab for education. Developers, in recognition of this fact, have crafted proposals to limit impacts on our schools, and, therefore, on our tax bills. These are often ultra-high-density projects like Tallgrass, but the pitch — now a familiar refrain — is that the project won’t bring a lot of children into our schools, either because ownership is limited to the over-55 set or because the housing units contain fewer than three bedrooms. So a plan with 378 homes developed with (theoretically) child-limiting housing stock is “better” than one with fewer, bigger homes, a large retail development and a golf course.

I find this all very sad. For one thing, children are not one of the seven plagues (though as the mother of teenagers, sometimes I wonder). And housing developments that don’t “add” children to the schools are not, by definition, automatically wonderful. Senior citizen housing comes with its own burdens — ask hospital administrators and our volunteer ambulance squads about that. Besides all that, the health of our local economy depends, in large part, on young workers who need to be able to buy houses and raise families.

We need the right mix of housing; single-family homes, townhouses, condos and rental units are all an important part of the mix. Sometimes it requires biting the bullet on a gargantuan housing project, like Tallgrass or the one being planned for Yaphank. Sometimes it means tacking a TDR component onto an open space bond or transfer tax.

But we also desperately need tax relief, and it can’t come from limiting the child-bearing-age population. It must come, in part, from the frugal administration of governments at all levels, from Albany down to the local school districts. And it must come from a wholesale restructuring of how we fund public education, one that shifts the burden from property taxes to income taxes. Without such a shift, property taxes here have nowhere to go but up; let’s not allow ourselves to be fooled by shallow promises of politicians willing to cook the books to win elections. (Did somebody say “tax holiday?”)

We’re in trouble here, folks. Who has the chutzpah to admit it and the backbone to tackle the crisis head-on? That’s what we need. As County Executive Steve Levy, a scrappy Democrat and self-described fiscal conservative, told the Republican convention when he accepted their cross-endorsement last week, taxes are not a partisan issue. Quality of life is not a partisan issue. These things transcend party politics. They are the stuff of the American Dream, things that are important to all of us, regardless of which box we check off on the voter enrollment form.

“Hi-Tax Foley” may sound good to Republican campaign strategists, just as the refrain of government reform in “Crookhaven” was sweet music for Democratic operatives two years ago. But voters will be looking beyond campaign slogans to the meat-and-potatoes of candidates’ plans to control property taxes and their ability to make the tough decisions that need to be made — to deliver government services efficiently, protect the environment, preserve our quality of life and allow the next generation to pursue its dreams in the place we call home.

Who is Joe Latini? (Or, the return of the llamas.)

I covered the Brookhaven Town and Suffolk County Republican party conventions at the Radisson Hotel in Holtsville Thursday evening. But the most interesting part of the evening involved Riverhead politics.

After the proceedings ended, I was chatting casually with the man who's running for tax receiver — I'm sorry but his name escapes me; I didn't write it down — when this other man I'd never met before came over and joined the conversation.

He started telling the tax receiver candidate he should move to Riverhead, like he himself had done. Things are so easy out there, he said. You can really influence elections. It's so small. Etc. He said, you can knock incumbents out so easily, because without the committee designation, there's no way they can win a primary. And then he started bragging about what he did in the last town election in Riverhead.

"I did it to Rose," he boasted. "And I can't wait to do it to Barbara. She's not going to get re-elected. She's not even going to get the nomination," he said with a big smile. "And I'm going to be grinning from here to here." He pointed at his ears with his two forefingers.

All right, then. I wasn't sure how, or whether, to respond to this. Who the heck was this guy? That's what I wanted to know. So I asked. Joe Latini, he told me. I introduced myself, but I'm fairly certain he knew exactly who he was talking to when he came over and said these things about Riverhead politics, Rose Sanders — who got railroaded out of office in a very sleazy campaign in 2005 — and Barbara Blass, who has a target on her back now. (Her party is mad at her for supporting Rose in the 2005 primary, among other things.)

Joe Latini. He lives in Wading River, apparently a recent transplant, because he was the Republican candidate for county legislator in the 5th district in 2003. He ran against Vivian Viloria-Fisher, the deputy presiding officer of the county legislature.

Blass, a Riverhead Republican, and Fisher, an East Setauket Democrat, have one thing in common that I know of (besides gender): the Long Island Environmental Voters Forum wants them both out of office.

I don't recall whether LIEVF took an official position against Sanders in 2003. But LIEVF board member Anthony Coates, who ran Republican Ed Densieski's failed supervisor campaign in 2003, was involved in creating a couple of very nasty anonymous mailers that went out to Republican voters on the eve of the GOP primary. (The Riverhead GOP didn't support their incumbent councilwoman, Sanders, nominating instead John Dunleavy. Sanders ran a primary campaign to try to get the nomination.) One of the anonymous mailers had a picture of Sanders, Blass and Hillary Clinton at an anti-Broadwater rally, organized by the Anti-Broadwater Coalition (of which LIEVF is a member). It didn't mention Broadwater; it just said, "Birds of a feather?" obviously trying to smear Sanders and Blass by associating them with the devil Hillary. Pretty ironic, a LIEVF board member involved in creating a mailing that slammed a candidate with a picture taken at an anti-Broadwater rally sponsored by a coalition LIEVF belongs to.

The News-Review tracked down the name of the owner of the vacant condo whose address was the return addresss on the anonymous mailer: Christopher Carbonne. We also tracked down the name of the mailing house that owned the bulk mail permit used on the mailer, Village Graphics. Anthony Coates admitted to me that he was the one who involved Chris Carbonne, a graphic artist, in the Sanders mailings. Carbonne was a personal acquaintance, he said. But Coates claimed, quite incredibly in my opinion, that he didn't know who had placed the order or who paid for the mailings. Carbonne and Village Graphics both wouldn't say.

LIEVF's campaign finance disclosure statements, posted online at the board of elections Web site, show a $1,725 payment to Christopher Carbonne, Inc. for "graphic design and printing" and a $540 payment to Village Graphics, "mail house" both on Nov. 3, five days before the 2005 general election. I looked at all of LIEVF's disclosures that are posted online. These were the only payments to Carbonne and Village Graphics ever made by LIEVF, at least for the eight reporting periods for which statements are posted online. So, did LIEVF order and pay for the Sanders mailers? Oh, irony of ironies, LIEVF paying for an anonymous mailer slamming a candidate with a picture taken of her at an anti-Broadwater event!

This was a question I had to ask. So I called up LIEVF's treasurer, Richard Amper, and asked him.

No, no, Amper said.

"That was a mailing we did against Viloria-Fisher," he told me.

Villoria-Fisher's opponent in 2005, Joe Michaels, doesn't list any in-kind contributions showing payment for mailings by LIEVF. (He shows one contribution from LIEVF, for $100, on Oct. 28, 2005.) But if it was the same nasty, anonymous mailer — an attack piece on the incumbent rather than a piece soliciting support for Michaels, maybe Michaels wouldn't have to disclose it by law. Or maybe, as Sanders' opponent John Dunleavy claimed in 2005, he knew nothing about it. Funny, if there was a nasty anonymous attack piece against Villoria-Fisher, she doesn't remember it. (I called and asked.) You'd think she would, but, she said, she tries not to dwell on the negative.

I guess we just have to take Dick Amper's word for it that LIEVF didn't pay Carbonne and Village Graphics for the anti-Sanders attack pieces.

It's interesting that Riverhead's got all these Brookhaven "players" involved in its local politics now. And maybe a little scary. Just like Latini said, Riverhead is small. And, yes, it's elections are probably very easy to influence, compared to a town like Brookhaven. But though it's a small town, it's got big issues, and lots of land. There are deals to be cut and there's money to be made. It's very appealing to these "players." The fun has just begun.