If Nassau voters want higher property taxes — and little in return — they should race to the polls Monday and pass a $400 million borrowing scheme for a new arena for the Islanders hockey team. That’ll do the trick.
If not, they should vote “no” in Monday’s referendum — in a heartbeat.
We certainly would.
Let’s face it: Nassau’s property taxes are already among the nation’s highest; the new debt for the arena would jack up levies by at least another 4 percent.
Yes, the Nassau Coliseum, where the team now plays, is obsolete and needs to be replaced. But Nassau is a fiscal train wreck, even beyond its killer taxes — with a projected budget deficit of $225 million and a $4 billion debt load.
Voters would have to be fiscal masochists to want to borrow and spend just under half a billion dollars more on a risky, private-sector venture.
Yet that’s precisely what County Executive Ed Mangano and Islanders owner Charles Wang are seeking.
What would taxpayers get in return?
Good question — because the Nassau County Office of Legislative Budget Review raised serious questions about the figures Mangano and Wang have used to push the deal.
Officially, the referendum asks whether the county should borrow $400 million
via a 30-year note for the project. But debt service and other costs would double the price tag to $800 million — and that doesn’t include cost overruns.
Plus, the Islanders would pay the county just $14 million a year in rent — barely half the $26 million cost of annual debt service.
Meantime, there’s scant evidence to back the claim that the project, about the size of the current coliseum, would create 3,000 jobs. Nor would the arena necessarily bring in new revenue: Experience suggests that money not spent in the coliseum were the Islanders gone would be spent elsewhere in the area.
Moreover, the deal has been written with highly generous terms for the team — which wouldn’t have to share TV, cable and Internet rights.
In short, it doesn’t pass the smell test.
If Wang, who vowed to move the team if he doesn’t get his way, feels so strongly, why doesn’t he get his own financing and pay for the new facility himself — just as the Yankees and the Mets did with their new stadiums?
The county Legislature and the Nassau County Interim Financial Authority, which now controls the county’s purse strings, can kill this deal.
But it shouldn’t come to that.
Voters should turn out Monday and vote this nonsense down.