Keeping NY blue, every which way

Daily Point

Nassau legislative map faces voting rights challenge

One of the Democratic Party’s strategies for getting a leg up on future elections in Nassau County rests with a controversial bill before Gov. Kathy Hochul that would shift county and local contests to even years. The stated aim of the measure is to improve turnout at the polls by pairing what are now “off-year” contests with national and statewide races. In New York, that theoretically means more Democrats voting in those down-ballot races.

Hochul had the bill sent to her office Dec. 12, as recorded on the State Legislature’s websites. So if she’s going to sign it as expected, sources told the Point on Thursday afternoon, that’s likely to emerge by Friday. One of the measure’s biggest fans is Jay Jacobs, who is both Hochul’s state Democratic chairman and the longtime Nassau County chairman.

County and local officials all over the state have voiced strong opposition.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has another strategy to stay in the game. This involves a new legal challenge to the Republican-enacted legislative map in Nassau County.

This would add to another state court claim, already pending, in which Democrats want to rewrite the new district lines by which county legislative candidates ran last month. Republicans ended up retaining their majority at just shy of two thirds of the chamber.

Filed in July, this earlier lawsuit says the Nassau map creates an “extreme partisan gerrymander” with districts favoring the “in” party. David Mejias, the plaintiffs’ attorney in that case, told The Point on Thursday that discovery is due in 30 days as the legal process unfolds. GOP officials consistently maintain that the map is fair and legal.

And now a separate but related front in the same fight has been opened by a coalition of nonprofit groups including the New York Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. They have given notice to the county legislature that, in their words, the redistricting in place “violates the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of New York (NYVRA) by diluting the voting strength and political influence of Black, Latino, and Asian residents.”

The notice, filed last week with Nassau County Clerk Maureen O’Connell, purportedly starts a 50-day “clock” ending in February “for the Legislature to fix its violations voluntarily, before facing what would be the first redistricting legal challenge brought under a state voting rights act,” the groups announced.

Democrats have maintained all through the extended redistricting process based on the 2020 census that there should be one more “majority-minority” district given the demographic changes of recent years. They allege “cracking and packing” of communities of color in Lakeview, Freeport, Inwood, South Valley Stream, Elmont, and New Hyde Park.

And all this effort to reopen maps occurs as the state’s reconstituted Independent Redistricting Commission commences a new “do-over” drawing New York congressional seats after Democrats, who dominate both legislative houses, lost seats in the 2022 midterms. The ten-member bipartisan panel is due to meet next Thursday, with a new set of statewide hearings expected in the new year.

It’s hard to recall a time when rules of the mapping game were up in the air on Long Island this far into any decade.

— Dan Janison dan.janison@newsday.com

Pencil Point

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Reference Point

A no-affordable-home rule

The call has been growing on Long Island: The region does not have enough housing affordable to those with modest incomes. But the arc of that complaint is long. Newsday’s editorial made the argument at least as far back as 1970, in a Dec. 21 piece called “A Good Assessment.”

The spark for that editorial was a comment from a well-respected Rochester lawmaker, State Sen. Thomas Laverne, a Rockefeller Republican known for his “comprehensive” understanding of home rule powers in New York. Laverne had recently commented that home rule is a “cover up for parochialism and prejudice …” The board agreed, saying the parochial part was obvious.

“The prejudice is more difficult to see. It is always muted, always disguised,” the board wrote. “There are now more than 400 welfare families living in motels in Nassau and Suffolk because of the shortage of low-cost housing. But no Long Island official will admit — at least in public — that the reason inexpensive public housing is seldom built is because of the fear that it will attract blacks and Puerto Ricans. Yet, this is the largest single reason why it is not available on Long Island.

“Towns and villages have the power to form authorities to build public housing. They seldom use it. Through the control of zoning, they also have the power to limit any form of multiple dwelling. This power they use often.”

Laverne went further than his observation, contending that home rule power should be “tempered by effective, sensitive regional planning.”

Newsday’s board also agreed with that sentiment, and congratulated then-Nassau County Executive-elect Ralph Caso for promising to appeal a court decision that stripped the county planning commission of its power to veto local zoning decisions.

The board also criticized what it called “an infantile form of protest” by the Nassau County Village Officials Association, which boycotted a Long Island meeting of a committee headed by Laverne. The president of the village association accused Laverne of having “a one-track mind. He wants to form a superstate.”

The board wrote: “The attitude of the association bespeaks something worse than a one-track mind: A closed mind.”

The back-and-forth presaged the Long Island pushback to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s recent attempt to bypass local control of zoning to jump-start the building of more housing. And those two moments serve as brackets to a half-century period in which home rule ruled and housing suffered.

As for Laverne, whether it was fallout for his home rule stance or not, after six terms in the State Senate he was defeated in his next attempt at reelection in 1972, losing a primary to a more conservative Republican.

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

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