Long Island towns and cities that broke their snow removal budgets last winter are proposing to spend $12 million less in 2016 than they spent last year, according to a Newsday review.

Despite the lessons from last year, when 12 municipalities overspent by $15.2 million — causing deficits, borrowing and snow taxes — officials across the Island say they are under pressure to stick to the state’s lowest-ever property tax cap — 0.73 percent — and could not draft bigger snow removal budgets. Those towns are proposing to add a combined $3.1 million to their budgets for this winter, according to a review of proposed and adopted budgets. The property tax cap has not fallen below 1 percent since it was imposed in 2012. It was 1.56 percent in 2015.

Some municipal officials describe the past two winters as anomalies. With these budgets, they are, in effect, rolling the dice that this winter will be different.

Those winters dumped roughly triple the average snowfall, with 63.3 inches falling at Islip MacArthur Airport in Ronkonkoma last winter, and 55.3 inches from January through April of 2014, according to the National Weather Service’s Upton bureau. The average for the first four months of the year on Long Island is 19 inches of snowfall. The 21.6 degree average for February was the lowest ever recorded at the airport since the weather service began tracking temperatures there in 1985.

Brookhaven overspent its $3.67 million snow removal budget last winter by $7.7 million for a total of $11.4 million. This year the town board has proposed a $5.68 million snow removal budget — up significantly from $2.6 million in 2013, when the town was criticized for slow snow removal. The past two winters cost Brookhaven a total of roughly $21 million.

LI towns’ snow removal spending in 2015 and proposed budget for 2016

“You’re not going to tax for a $10 million snow removal because it’s such an anomaly,” Brookhaven Highway Superintendent Daniel Losquadro said.

Two towns that exceeded their budgets by several million dollars have reduced their snow removal budgets for 2016 to below the amount set last year. Islip Town, which last winter spent about $1.6 million more than its $2.4 million budget for snow removal, has proposed a budget that is $400,000 below last year’s budget line. East Hampton, which spent more than double the $432,000 allocated for snow removal this year, approved a $30,000 reduction below last year’s baseline amount.

By not keeping the 2016 budgets in line with actual costs, officials could be setting towns and cities up for future deficits, experts say. To cover actual snow removal costs in the past, budget officials turned to borrowing, amended their original budgets, or dipped into contingency and reserve funds. This year Brookhaven residents will again be taxed a “snow note” — between $50 and $60 expected this year — to cover any overages.

Other towns are budgeting for increases from last year’s amounts, but still short of what they actually spent. In Babylon, for example, the snow removal budget is $900,000, up by $300,000. The town spent roughly $1.1 million last winter.

Stephen Lynch, superintendent of highways for East Hampton, said he worked to keep the budget within the town’s cap.

“My budget is tight,” Lynch said. He said he did not think it would be fair to ask for more money from the taxpayers and end up not needing it.

Not all municipalities exceeded their snow removal lines in 2015, including Riverhead and the City of Long Beach, which was under by $115,000 and dropped its budget by $15,000.

Only two towns on Long Island that busted the budget in 2015 followed up with a 2016 budget bigger than 2015’s actual costs. North Hempstead exceeded its $726,000 budget by more than $280,000 last winter, and increased the line to $1.03 million for 2016, about $17,000 more than what was spent in 2015. Shelter Island, population 2,300 and where ferry fees drive a portion of the snow removal costs, exceeded the $90,000 snow removal line by $4,600, and has followed up with a $100,000 budget.

“We see that we need to allocate more funding for snow removal, to make sure we’re presenting a budget that will accurately reflect the needs we’re facing,” North Hempstead Supervisor Judi Bosworth said.

LI towns’ snow removal spending in 2015

The bar indicates by how much towns went over or under their planned budgets. Hover over each bar for details.

North Hempstead officials had originally proposed a smaller increase to the snow removal budget — by $201,000 — in the first draft of the budget that was due by Sept. 30. However, officials reconsidered the figure and added another $98,000 for the town’s second budget draft.

Bosworth said the approach is not to “make a wish on a star to say we won’t have the same kind of snow; we may have the same kind of winter.”

Jeffrey Griswold, president of the New York State Association of Town Superintendents of Highways, said “the old days of just putting a 2 or 3 percent increase,” on snow removal budgets “are gone” in the era of property tax caps.

“It’s a point that brings everybody to the table,” Griswold said. “At that point, you got to go back to the taxpayers: What can they afford?”

East Hampton’s Lynch said officials used a $2 million surplus this year — but those surplus accounts statewide may shrink steadily along with the tax cap over the next few years. However, Lynch said officials are keeping an eye on weather patterns to see if the trend holds.

“If we get the same thing all over again, then we’ll take a different approach to it,” Lynch said.

LI towns snow removal budget details

Data visualizations by Ann Choi

On Jan. 23, 2013, one of Long Island’s coldest nights in years, Jack Franqui shivered in a Suffolk County Police Department holding cell wearing only his socks and underwear, his bruised body soaked in toilet water. He had been ranting for hours that the cops had unfairly targeted him and that he planned to leave his cell in a body bag.

He fashioned a noose from a pair of bluejeans knotted to the bars of his cell. It was the third time in a matter of hours that Franqui — a 26-year-old man from Rocky Point booked on misdemeanor charges — had tied something to the bars. Officers on duty at the Seventh Precinct in Shirley had already confiscated a blanket and Franqui’s T-shirt in separate incidents. But officers ignored protocol and failed to put Franqui under closer supervision or transport him to a hospital.

A medical examiner would later state that it takes roughly ten minutes for somebody to die by hanging the way Franqui did. During that time, the only other prisoner in the cellblock said he faced a surveillance camera, made frantic gestures toward Franqui’s cell and screamed for officers to come save the dying man.

When nobody came, he gave up. He heard gasping, bones cracking and then silence.

An officer eventually noticed Franqui’s dangling body on a closed-circuit monitor.

“What is this guy doing now?” the officer, Joseph Simeone, remarked.

Read Part 2

Franqui’s body was cold to the touch by the time officers made it to the cellblock. Deciding there was no point in trying to resuscitate him, officers left Franqui’s body hanging in his makeshift noose.

The homicide detectives who arrived soon after began to piece together what had gone wrong. The officers on duty kept records documenting prisoner checks that may not have actually occurred. The officers failed to act not only after Franqui had tied two items to the bars, but also despite obvious signs of erratic behavior witnessed by the other prisoner including banging his head repeatedly against the wall, drenching himself in toilet water and begging to be taken to the hospital.

Detectives found that an intercom system that pipes in sound from the cellblock to where officers were stationed 70 feet away had been switched off. And officers had turned up the volume on a TV they were watching loud enough to drown out the other prisoner’s screams for help.

Suffolk County’s law enforcement officials did not tell the public this story of failure and neglect. Instead, the department contradicted its own internal documents in saying that Franqui was calm, at ease and showed “no indication” that he was suicidal before he took officers by surprise and suddenly killed himself.

Franqui’s family got the same story, and for months, they had no choice but to assume it was the truth.

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There’s an increasing burden on police officers to deal with mental health issues requiring a law enforcement response. Suffolk officers transported 4,273 people, most of them involuntarily, to a psychiatric ward in 2014. The number has risen steadily every year since 2008, when Suffolk officers transported 2,524 people for psychiatric care.

SCPD cadets receive hours of training on how to handle encounters with the mentally ill, and the department’s rules and procedures call for “compassionate, safe and effective handling” of those dealing with “possible mental/emotional issues.”

“You’re dealing with good people, but they’re suffering from this illness,” said SCPD Sgt. Colleen Cooney, speaking in general and not about Jack Franqui. “And the officer has to realize that they may not be behaving in their best way because they’re dealing with this illness, which might make them dangerous to themselves or others.”

Before Franqui’s clash with local law enforcement in December 2011, he led what was on the surface an unremarkable life. After attending Rocky Point High, he lived in a rented 720-square-foot, cream-colored duplex on Xylo Road, drove a Honda and owned a dog named Dog.

Franqui’s friends said he liked to unwind after work by playing Xbox while smoking marijuana. He worked as a chef at the American Red Cross, where he cooked meals for the elderly. After his death, some of the older women who worked with him there would take the time to write remembrances of the goofy, lanky young man who called them “Auntie” and was famous for his “egg in a boat breakfasts.”

An only child whose parents had divorced when he was a teenager, Franqui spent time on the nearby Long Island Sound, kayaking or puttering on a 12-foot motorboat owned by his father, Joaquin Franqui, who like five generations of men dating back to Spanish roots also goes by Jack.

“He was my fishing buddy,” the elder Franqui, a facilities manager at Stony Brook University, said of his son. “He was my constant companion. We did everything together.”

When he learned that Franqui had killed himself in a precinct holding cell, he recalled an incident from when his son was 17. One day his son came home with a puncture wound to his stomach and told his father that some guys had jumped him. But the elder Franqui always suspected the wound was self-inflicted.

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Kristy Repp, Franqui’s onetime girlfriend, said he had untreated mental problems and had threatened suicide “at least five or six” times when she attempted to break up with him.

“Anybody who’s taken Psych 101 would tell you that he was bipolar,” Repp said.

Repp said she finally decided to call the authorities on the morning of Dec. 1, 2011. She was with Franqui at his home as he threatened suicide while “loading a shotgun and putting it into his mouth.”

Repp said she expected an ambulance. “I didn’t expect the police force to show up like he had just robbed the bank,” Repp said.

Officers flooded a narrow Rocky Point road before noon on a Thursday, making for a chaotic scene and perhaps explaining why officers later filed statements that were inconsistent on two key claims: whether Franqui stepped outside his house with a gun, and whether he fired it at an officer.

In charging documents, two officers at the scene attested that Franqui was outside his house brandishing a loaded .38 Special. However, a third officer alleged only that she witnessed Franqui announce that “he had a gun in his pocket” when he exited his house.

Repp said she watched the incident unfold from a nearby driveway, roughly 200 feet away. She denied that Franqui brought a gun outside, although that was ultimately the charge for which he would be convicted. She said Franqui stood in the middle of the street, unarmed and wearing only his boxer shorts, yelling at the officers.

Franqui then ran inside, and Repp said she watched through the ajar front door as Franqui grabbed a gun. Officers reported that as Franqui was “kicking and wrestling” with police Officer Douglas Libonati, he fractured the officer’s hand. Franqui was finally subdued, but not before he “shot a loaded firearm” at Officer Kevin Corrigan, according to complaints filed by two officers.

Repp disputed that, saying that after Franqui ran inside his house, he put a revolver to his own face as the officers surrounded him. “They kicked the door in and the gun shot off behind him and went in the ceiling,” Repp said.

Corrigan himself filed a report reinforcing the narrative that Franqui had taken a shot at him. In a criminal complaint, Corrigan stated that Franqui “fired a functioning handgun in close proximity and in the direction of your deponent [Corrigan] and striking the ceiling.”

Two of the officers who were at the scene of that 2011 arrest would be called to testify before grand jurors investigating Franqui’s 2013 suicide. They are not identified by name, but their testimony as to what happened that day, as summarized by a grand jury report, does not contradict Repp’s version of events.