How Nassau County vendors have bypassed a new campaign contribution disclosure law

“The problem with these regulations is political money is like water — it’ll find a way in if there’s a way in,” said Brian Adams, a professor of political science at San Diego State University who has studied how money is raised for local campaigns. “And there often isn’t the political will for the full disclosure of anything.”

The law was a response to a series of county contracting scandals that arose in 2015. But some county leaders initially wanted more.

August 24, 2015 - How Newsday covered the story

A ‘pay to play’ ban falters

The May 2015 federal indictment of then-State Sen. Dean Skelos, which included charges that he improperly influenced the awarding of a Nassau County contract to a firm that employed his son, Adam, sparked intense scrutiny on the county’s contracting system. In the months that followed, County Executive Edward Mangano and his chief deputy, Rob Walker, were the subject of separate federal investigations involving county contracts, and Newsday reported on the county’s practice of awarding many agreements to politically connected vendors at amounts that barely missed the threshold for legislative and public attention.

Walker and Mangano in December 2009. Photo by Michael E. Ach.

Mangano responded by forming a panel to make contracting reform recommendations. One of the recommendations was an anti-‘pay to play’ law that banned or limited vendors’ political contributions to county officials, modeled on other municipalities’ efforts. Mangano said he’d support the effort, at first, but when county legislators balked, he settled for the disclosure law.

The law passed in December 2015 and took effect Apr. 1, 2016.

County satisfied with law

County Attorney Carnell Foskey told Newsday that the disclosures, despite the loopholes, were meeting their purpose, which he said was “to capture that those who make financial contributions to county officials with contract-approval authority do so freely and without expectation of a governmental benefit or fear of reprisal.” He maintained that political party committees should not be subject to the disclosure because they “are not in the contract-approval process.”

Nassau County Attorney Carnell Foskey. Photo by Audrey C. Tiernan.

The county has yet to create a searchable public database of the new vendor disclosure forms, meaning a reporter had to pull them from each of the 279 contracts to for-profit companies submitted since last April to conduct Newsday's analysis.

Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, a Washington nonprofit that focuses on ethics and campaign finance issues, said Nassau’s efforts to boost transparency – considering the disclosure’s loopholes and their lack of a centralized database – did not seem comprehensive.

“If they just want to address half the problem by having a disclosure system, it’s got be easily and publicly accessible,” Holman said. “The county has made almost no effort to try to address their problem here.”

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Search all vendor contributions in the table below. The list includes both money directly from the named company as well as money from company principals and affiliated firms. In some cases, money is listed as undisclosed because it was given after the date that a vendor filled out their most-recent publicly available disclosure form. Some firms also named recipients of contributions that were given before the law took effect.

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