NIFA gets a "new" chairman

Daily Point

He’s baaaack

On Friday, Gov. Kathy Hochul finally announced one of Nassau County political circles’ worst-kept secrets: She’s appointing Richard Kessel as the next chairman of the Nassau Interim Finance Authority.

And in appointing Kessel as NIFA head, Hochul is taking a page out of a 23-year-old playbook.

Kessel, after all, was an original NIFA board member, appointed by Republican Gov. George Pataki in 2000. He held a spot on the NIFA board until early 2008. 

Now, after stints at the Long Island Power Authority, the New York Power Authority, and Nassau County’s Industrial Development Agency, Kessel, a Democrat, is back as NIFA’s chairman. And he told The Point Friday he has one top priority: Nassau University Medical Center.

“I’m looking forward to working with the governor and the board and the county administration to do whatever we can to continue the fiscal strength of the county,” Kessel said. “Obviously, my focus, along with the board’s, is going to have to be the medical center — the hospital — and what we’re going to do to fix it.

“And we will fix it,” he added. Kessel told The Point that he spoke with original NIFA chair Frank Zarb on Friday, in an effort to seek input and advice.

Kessel succeeds Adam Barsky, who headed NIFA for more than seven years. Barsky noted that the county now has the highest credit ratings it’s had since NIFA was established and argued that he helped to eliminate “the bad practices that put the county in the control period in the first place.” 

“When I look back, [I’m] proud of all that has been done,” Barsky told The Point.

Kessel has been a key player in Long Island’s political scene for decades, having established relationships with both Republicans and Democrats over the years. Talk of Kessel assuming the NIFA chairmanship has been swirling for months and ramped up after Kessel announced in March that he was stepping down from his post at the IDA.

With some Nassau County officials arguing that the time for NIFA’s control period has come and gone, the question, perhaps, is whether Kessel will be overseeing the end of what he was there to start.

But if the massive task of fixing NUMC is Kessel’s goal, it’s unlikely NIFA control will be ending anytime soon.

— Randi F. Marshall randi.marshall@newsday.com and Dan Janison dan.janison@newsday.com

Pencil Point

Help wanted in Washington

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Final Point

The results are in — but a challenge awaits

In the contentious battle over trustee seats for the Smithtown Library, “Libraries are for Everyone” won against “Libraries for All.”

While eight individuals had been vying for four spots in Tuesday's election, they quickly formed two slates. Incumbents Brianna Baker-Stines and Barbara Deal, along with Theresa Stabile and Christopher Sarvis, ran together and won, with individual vote totals ranging from 1,757 to 1,882.

The foursome beat the “Libraries for All” slate, which included Hector Gavilla, Lucian Durso, JoAnn Lynch, and Vanest Avergel, who ended up with between 956 and 1,123 votes each.

But by Thursday morning, Gavilla told library officials he was contesting the results, saying in an email obtained by The Point through a Freedom of Information request that the “absentee voting process was very flawed and open to corruption.”

“We will never have a fair election with early voting that has no methods to prevent fraud,” Gavilla wrote in the email.

The election had become heated long before Tuesday’s vote, with LGBTQ+ related books coming under particular scrutiny.

The “Libraries for All” candidates, who had the backing of leaders of the conservative America First Warehouse in Ronkonkoma, emphasized “family and community values,” arguing that certain LGBTQ+ related books shouldn’t be accessible to children and that some conservative books were being kept out of the library.

The winning slate, meanwhile, ran on a platform promising a library that would “be a safe and inclusive place for all residents” and garnered the support of the library’s CSEA union.

On social media after the election, Gavilla argued that absentee ballots were to blame for his slate's loss.

“We have been infiltrated by Marxists who are indoctrinating our innocent children,” he wrote.

The Smithtown Library system has four districts — Commack, Kings Park, Nesconset, and Smithtown. The winning slate won all of them. Of the 2,807 total ballots cast, 266 total were absentee and another 133 were provided by affidavit, according to detailed results provided to The Point. Meanwhile, the difference between the highest vote-getter on Gavilla’s slate and the lowest vote-getter on the winning slate was 634. So, even if Gavilla and his team won every absentee and affidavit vote cast, they still wouldn’t make up the difference.

— Randi F. Marshall randi.marshall@newsday.com

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