Who's taking whom to the State of the Union

Daily Point

Be our guest, be our guest — the headlines will do the rest

Competing political narratives about migrants and crime in New York City shape the local guest list for Thursday night’s State of the Union speech by President Joe Biden.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, who on Wednesday made the controversial decision to send the state’s National Guard to stand watch in New York City's subways, is the guest of Rep. Adriano Espaillat who represents part of Manhattan and the Bronx. Espaillat’s office said he extended the invitation to the state’s first female governor because March was Women’s History Month.

Meanwhile, 4th Congressional District Rep. Anthony D’Esposito’s guests will be two New York City cops involved in last month’s Times Square brawl with migrants, a rowdy incident where the police bodycam video went viral and raised the heat over the influx of migrants. D’Esposito, a former member of the NYPD, is co-hosting Officer Zunxu Tian and Lt. Ben Kurian along with Staten Island Rep. Nicole Malliotakis. The two officers will get a prime spot in the seating gallery of House Speaker Mike Johnson. D’Esposito is considered one of the most vulnerable GOP representatives in the nation.

Immigration and Israel will certainly be among the hot topics Biden will address Thursday night. And so will the American Rescue Plan, one of the president’s signature achievements. Sen. Chuck Schumer, always one to work the local angle and flash bipartisan credentials in a red area, is taking Kevin McCaffrey, the majority leader of the Suffolk County Legislature and a Republican.

McCaffrey, who is also president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 707, worked with Schumer to get $12 million for the local to restore full pension benefits to union members whose retirement plan was threatened with insolvency by the 2008 stock market crash.

Newly returned House member Tom Suozzi is bringing Ronen and Orna Neutra of Plainview whose son Omer, a tank commander for the Israeli military, was taken hostage by Hamas in the Oct. 7 attack. Suozzi’s 3rd District has one of the largest Jewish populations of any congressional district in the nation and Suozzi made return of the hostages a focus in the recent special election.

1st District Rep. Nick LaLota is trying to make headlines with his guest, Harrison Li of Huntington, the son of a constituent he says is falsely imprisoned in China on espionage charges. LaLota spoke on the House floor last week about the need to bring home Kai Li, who was arrested in Shanghai in 2016, and hopes the attention on Li will make the Biden administration prioritize negotiating for his release.

Andrew Garbarino, who represents the 2nd Congressional District, is taking the lowest profile in the State of the Union. There have been no tweets, news releases or TV appearances about his guest. When his office was asked by The Point whom he had invited, the response from spokeswoman Kristen Cianci was “a local small business owner from Long Island” with no specifics forthcoming.

That’s the approach when you hold probably the safest seat in the four-member Long Island House delegation.

— Rita Ciolli rita.ciolli@newsday.com

Pencil Point

Walled off

For more cartoons, visit www.newsday.com/nationalcartoons

Reference Point

NUMC's diagnosis: A legacy of greed

Shaky finances for Nassau County’s public mission hospital. Future funding in doubt. What to do?

The urgency expressed by Newsday’s editorial board was palpable — in 1951.

The situation worrying the board had to do with the infusion of money the hospital — now known as Nassau University Medical Center, then called Meadowbrook Hospital — received from the horse-racing operation at Belmont Park. Two years earlier, on Jan. 29, 1949, the board praised that funding flow, writing that “Nassau County has collected more than $12,000,000 as its share of the tax on betting at Belmont racetrack. Three-quarters of this is being put to good use by doubling the size of Meadowbrook Hospital, adding 17 new buildings and 369 more hospital beds. So the gambling at Belmont is benefiting the entire community.”

By Feb. 8, 1951, the board was worried that “Nassau’s share of the tax revenue from Belmont Park, which has done wonders in enlarging Meadowbrook Hospital, is now being annually diminished to the vanishing point.”

The obvious conclusion: Financing for the troubled hospital has always been something of a gamble.

The board’s decades-old writings on revenue streams for NUMC’s predecessors were part of commentary on the hospital over many years covering many topics that have resonated for better and for worse.

As far back as Jan. 23, 1947, the board underscored the facility’s importance by noting that it was the only hospital on Long Island that would treat alcoholism. On Jan. 22, 1951, the board praised Meadowbrook Hospital for handling half of Nassau County’s 10,029 ambulance calls the previous year “with only four that can go anywhere at any time.” And on March 19, 1956, the board noted that “the only low-cost psychiatric service for Nassau is Meadowbrook Hospital’s 28-bed ward and adult out-patient clinic. It has a long waiting list. Suffolk has no facilities at all.”

Other editorials tapped into other veins that have plagued the hospital. On Jan. 19, 1973, the editorial board worried about a lack of transparency that foreshadowed a continuing opaqueness about some of its operations. In the case from 51 years ago, the board wrote that Nassau County Medical Center was the only one of five hospitals in the county that refused to disclose its statistics on open-heart surgery survival rates, prompting the board to write that “sick people are entitled to all the available information from hospitals where they might become patients.”

More troubling commentary came on Dec. 19, 1970, in a piece called “A Questionable Contract.” The board followed up an investigation spearheaded by legendary reporter Bob Greene that found that Nassau County was about to sign off on “spending almost $1,000,000 in excessive costs for the installation of an electrical system at the medical center.” The board noted that the firm about to reap that profit was politically connected and had been targeted by several cities for official investigations, concluding that the county was on “the brink of an inexcusable waste of tax money.”

But the most-telling words in the editorial were in the board’s opening paragraph.

“The Nassau County Medical Center is no boondoggle,” the board wrote. “It’s an enlightened, compassionate public response to the need for a sophisticated medical facility in a county of more than 1,500,000 persons. But any quite complex $100,000,000 public project is quite simply a temptation for weak men and greedy men both in and out of public office.”

Temptation and greed has long been a diagnosis of the contracts and hiring making NUMC ill.

— Michael Dobie michael.dobie@newsday.com, Amanda Fiscina-Wells amanda.fiscina-wells@newsday.com

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