County Executive Tom Suozzi has been credited with turning around a bankrupted Nassau County, balancing the county’s budget through a sell-off of government property, and showing remarkable vision with a plan to transform the county with smart-growth planning.
As an upstart Democrat seeking the governorship of New York, Suozzi’s ideas get credit, but also leave real estate professionals pondering the future. Some might think the baby-faced Suozzi is a neophyte politician with good luck and degrees in law and accounting. But he also has eight years behind him as mayor of Glen Cove, previous home to financier J.P. Morgan, writer Thomas Pynchon, and retailer F.W. Woolworth.
Mediating disputes among propertied interests may have prepared him for his job as county executive, and given him the guts to put forth his “New Suburbia” plan, slated for the Hub area between Hempstead and Garden City, Long Island suburbs that are notoriously anti-tax and racially segregated along geographical lines.
Conceived by county planners, engineers STV Inc., and architect-planners FX Fowle, the plan combines mixed-used development, a new sports coliseum, a light rail transit system to connect the elements, and an “Emerald Ribbon” of parks connecting isolated sections of the 9-square-mile, donut-shaped area. It also included a 62-story office tower, which would have been by far the tallest building on Long Island, eclipsing the 19-story Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow. The tower was dropped after opponents claimed it would clash with the suburban skyline.
Suozzi’s plan has retained a degree of open space in the country’s third most densely populated suburban county, while providing much needed mass transit connecting college campuses, retail areas, parks, and residential areas now overwhelmed by car traffic.
His admirers say he is helping Long Island and the rest of the state develop new templates to deal with overcrowding, which include the depletion of fresh water, space, and other natural resources. His fans say his approach blends the best planning techniques while also promoting economic growth and local job planning.
Yet his campaign for governor against popular state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has also been marred by allegations of campaign contribution impropriety. And questions have been raised even among his admirers about how well-equipped the executive would be in dealing with the rough and tough politics of Albany.
Prior to Suozzi’s inauguration in January 2002, the Maxwell School of Public Affairs at Syracuse University rated Nassau as the “worst run” county in the nation. A trained accountant, Suozzi got to work eliminating waste by shedding the county of duplicate jobs, realigning its government contracts, and cutting the workforce to its smallest level in 30 years, reducing spending by $100 million, and balancing the budget.
Since then, Nassau County’s bond rating has been upgraded 11 times in less than three years and is rated in the “A” ranks by Moody’s, Fitch, and Standard & Poor’s “for the first time in over 12 years,” said a county press release.
“He’s a very aggressive, efficient, innovative, and honest guy,” said Len Cornell, who owns his own title insurance business and watched Suozzi as mayor for eight years of Glen Cove, the town they share in common. As mayor of the tony town, Suozzi impressed a lot of Long Islanders. Glen Cove residents were further impressed when Suozzi became county executive. “He took the Republican stronghold and he turned it around,” Cornell said.
Mary Ann Tighe, of commercial brokerage giant CB Richard Ellis, said she saw Suozzi speak at an event on Long Island and liked what she saw. As CEO of CBRE’s New York Tri-State Region, Tighe emphasized that her $50,000 contribution to Suozzi’s campaign was personal and not related to business that the Long Island group of CBRE does with Nassau County.
“I’ve been impressed with the job Tom has done in Nassau,” she told The Real Deal. “He has turned the county government around by reforming operations and stabilizing its fiscal condition.”
Tighe’s company inherited the Nassau consulting job when they acquired Insignia, who had won the consultancy with the county in 2002.
Creating a vision for the future
Nassau County, with a population of over 1.3 million, is larger than seven states; and its $2.4 billion budget is greater than 16 states. It also suffers from some of the best and worst vestiges of an evolved suburban area, including congestion, traffic problems, overused spaces, and a lack of unified and connected public space.
Because of its proximity to New York City, land is expensive, and middle- and working-class homes have given way to expensive houses and condominiums averaging over $450,000. It’s dotted with glass-enclosed malls which are home to retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus, and neatly manicured lawns that say “keep out” to outsiders. The area also boasts a median income over $70,000, and 17 percent of the population has a net worth greater than $1 million.
Minus the high incomes and land values, Nassau could be a microcosm of what the rest of New York State might look like if suburban sprawl continues unabated without the benefit of intelligent planning and design. Which is why Suozzi’s lessons learned on Long Island could be prescient for the rest of New York.
Nassau is often described as one of America’s “first suburbs” because it was formed in the 1920s as an outcropping to New York City, organized around the idea of using mass transit to ferry commuters back and forth to their jobs. But demographic and social changes are creating infrastructure demands that were never envisioned.
Nassau County has become an employment center unto itself, a reverse of the commuter suburb it used to be.
“Twenty-five percent [of residents] now take the train to New York, and 75 percent live and work on Long Island,” said Mark Strauss, principal at FX Fowle.
This has led to a growing number of logistical and transportation problems; isolated centers of activity such as retail, colleges, work places, residential buildings, and parks; and an enormous amount of car travel to get between them, Strauss explained.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a speech last February that Suozzi and his team “have really tried to surface some of the problems that have been denied or overlooked for a while,” she said. “We are filling [the suburbs] up, and choking them off, and we need to have a strategy.”
According to Strauss, Suozzi saw these problems as an opportunity to really redefine Nassau County.
The Hub plan covers an area of nine square miles that includes Nassau Community and Hofstra colleges, a retail mall, light industrial and technology centers, several parks and preserves, and the Nassau Coliseum.
“None of it was connected, and it was all this isolated development and 25 percent of the land area is surface parking,” said Strauss. As he described it, the plan would bring transit rail to the center, have more intense development and create an urban core at the center of Nassau County. It would connect Hempstead to the southwest, Garden City to the west, Mineola to the northwest, and Old Westbury to the northeast.
But selling a project to the populace that even smells like urban is tough in Nassau County. Especially when it frightens residents who fear losing their suburban way of life, a concept fraught with many complex undertones, including ideas about ownership, xenophobia, and differences in income and race, and plummeting land values should others be allowed access.
Some questionable contributions
While his real estate planning has received accolades, Suozzi’s campaign has also been the recipient of financial contributions connected with real estate businesses who have recently felt the heat of the attorney general’s office. Whether Suozzi agrees with his donors, or simply can’t amass the funds necessary to mount an effective campaign against Spitzer without them may not matter, since the public outcry against the funds has been much louder and effective than his defense. (Despite many calls to Suozzi’s campaign over a month’s time, no one would speak for this article.)
Take the October 2005 subpoenas against four title insurance companies by Spitzer as an example, including First American Title Corporation. As a company, First American Title did not donate money to Suozzi. But the company’s chief executive, James Orphanides, and several of the company’s officers, did give Suozzi’s campaign money, according to campaign disclosures.
Suozzi also received more than $500,000 from friends and associates of one of Spitzer’s most vocal critics, Home Depot co-founder Kenneth Langone, according to activist group Citizen’s Action of New York. Langone is being sued by Spitzer’s office for his role as the head of the committee that approved almost $200 million in compensation to Richard Grasso, the former chief of the New York Stock Exchange.
Suozzi has also received scores of donations made by a chain of extended care facilities that were found to be cheating Medicaid and asked to pay back more than $800,000 by the attorney general. The long list of facilities, among them Nassau Extended Care, Park Avenue Extended Care, and Throgs Neck Extended Care, were investigated and fined in 2002.
“It’s pretty outrageous for Suozzi to be financing his campaign largely from individuals who want to get back at Spitzer for Spitzer’s efforts to protect consumers and investors around the country,” said Richard Kirsch, executive director of Citizen Action.
Suozzi and Albany
Many players in the Long Island political and real estate scene were reticent to talk about Suozzi’s chances to become governor against the front-runner Spitzer. Polls still show Spitzer ahead by 72 percent to 11 percent. Some attribute this to Suozzi’s lack of political experience that at times has allegedly put him at loggerheads with important figures in Albany such as state Sen. Joseph L. Bruno and state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
“There are some things in Albany that are complicated and he has to figure out how to make people work toward the goal,” said one observer who declined to be identified.
Others are more vocal in their faith in Suozzi’s skills. “He is willing to go up against the naysayers and say, ‘This is what we need to do,'” said Strauss, who saw how much Suozzi had to do to get the Hub project going. “I love working with him, and I hope he becomes governor.”
And, for some, while admitting that Spitzer makes a formidable opponent, they think Suozzi understands Nassau’s special problems better.
When Spitzer came to speak to a large group of business leaders, “It sounded like he was addressing the issues pertinent to people Upstate, versus Long Island, which is about to burst,” said one person attending the event who preferred to remain anonymous. “I was so excited to get to hear him for the first time, and I came away thinking this man has not done his homework.”