История создания и современные различия 96 деревень Лонг-Айленда

Tenth and last in a series. A major theme of this article series has been that villages are incredibly diverse, and I wanted to end with a look at how disparate Long Island’s 96 villages are and why that might be. While most of Long Island’s villages are quite small, it is also home to the three largest villages in the state by population: Hempstead, Freeport, and Valley Stream. These three are more populous than both of the island’s two cities – Glen Cove and Long Beach – and have greater or equivalent densities. The combined population from just these three accounts for 30% of residents in Nassau County’s 64 villages. Mayor John Kennedy said the size and breadth of Freeport’s services make it stand out. “I can’t say we share much with many other villages,” he said. The village has a nearly $90 million yearly budget which covers everything from garbage collection to parking enforcement to funding the village’s $24 million police department. Freeport even has its own power plant, which Kennedy said provides 50 megawatts to the grid, allowing residents to buy back energy for 47% less than in surrounding areas. Compare that to the smallest village by area in the state, South Floral Park, which just passed a $575,000 budget this year. That is less than the average price of a single home in the village. Mayor Portia Lyons said the village has just six employees: a clerk, deputy clerk, court clerk, code enforcer, and two personnel for the department of public works Beyond the three largest villages, several others still provide their residents with most of their local services, such as the Village of Mineola. Mineola takes care of its own water, sewage, sanitation, roads, parks, library, fire protection, and property assessments. The county still provides police protection and the town provides marginal services like issuing dog licenses and elder care. “Mineola has no special districts,” Mayor Paul Pereira said proudly. “I actually can’t imagine [Mineola] running more efficiently if we were part of the town, and I think that people in town government recognize that.” And depending on their size, village mayors brought up quite different concerns. Kennedy and Hempstead Mayor Waylyn Hobbs both said they have put pressure on Nassau County to increase the share of sales tax revenue they receive which is up to the county’s discretion. Large villages like theirs generate millions of dollars in sales tax revenue which they only see a fraction of. Hobbs is pushing for Hempstead to be issued a city charter from the state legislature in part because cities can collect a greater sum of sales taxes. Hobbs said that as a city, Hempstead could collect between $2 to $3 million dollars in sales tax revenue, greater than many villages’ entire budgets. Kennedy said he sees the deprivation of sales tax revenue as a major con of being a village, with Freeport only getting $119,000 of $18 million in sales tax generated in the village. But he also said that trying to become a city is a fool’s errand. “I think it’s a feeble attempt,” he said. “I’m not gonna even try it.” The state legislature hasn’t issued a city charter in 80 years. Despite Hobbs and Kennedy feeling that they’re getting the short end of the stick, they’re lucky compared to villages in Suffolk who receive no cut of sales tax from the county. Small village mayors on the other hand don’t see this as a major concern since their villages have either small commercial strips or none at all. Their concerns are largely about development while mayors of populous urban villages like Hempstead and Freeport say their residents are not concerned about development at all; their villages are already quite built up. Nassau County Village Officials Association President Steve Weinberg said that support for local control over zoning is what unites the county’s otherwise disparate 64 villages. Weinberg said the NCVOA’s lobbyist in Albany is “constantly” reviewing proposed state legislation for any zoning changes. “What we always, always, always look for is any infringement on village zoning or Home Rule,” said Weinberg. “One size does not fit all … you can’t mandate change statewide.” Suffolk County Village Officials Association President Mayor Michael Lavorata agreed. “The most important thing about a village is your Home Rule,” he said. “The state should not be able to come in and tell us what to do. That’s why we have zoning.” Lavorata emphasized the importance of finding common interest between villages’ because they can only be a political force as a united bloc. “Without [SCVOA], villages would be lone voices in the wind,” he said. The vast differences between villages today can often be illuminated by looking at the reasons they incorporated in the first place, which the first half of this article series focused on. The first villages to incorporate on Long Island did so because they were growing population centers in need of adequate services that the sparsely populated towns couldn’t provide. So communities like Hempstead, Rockville Centre, Freeport, and Mineola created governments to provide things like improved lighting and fire protection. Small groups of wealthy estate owners then exploited village law to create governments for entirely different reasons. They created villages to protect their wealth by evading town taxes and keeping out land speculators. Soon enough, land developers began creating luxury communities that incorporated as villages to retain their exclusive character, and a village arms race made it so that well-off landowners all over the North Shore created their own governments to claim local control. While most of these events happened between 100 and 150 years ago, the history of a village’s inception can be quite insightful. The areas that were the epicenter of village fever are still quite wealthy today and their governments are geared towards retaining their communities’ pristine exclusive character by keeping out development with strict zoning codes. Meanwhile, the earliest villages have grown to become dense population centers like Hempstead, which seeks to become a city. They are more urban, more racially diverse, and less wealthy. Their governments are much larger and provide a much larger range of services. Hempstead and Sands Point are both villages, but their distinct reasons for incorporating shaped the communities they are today. History hides in plain sight, even in the most mundane corners of public life. We just need to look for it.