SUFFOLK CLOSEUP
By Karl Grossman
Robert Lipp of St. James retired this month as director of Suffolk County’s Budget Review Office. It was created in 1976 following the establishment of a Suffolk County Legislature in 1970. It was seen as a Suffolk version of the U.S. General Accounting Office (now called the Government Accountability Office).
It was a brilliant concept for Suffolk. And Dr. Lipp has been a brilliant director of BRO.
The GAO was formed in 1921 to be, as its history relates, “a U.S. legislative agency that monitors and audits government spending and operations. The GAO tracks how the legislative and executive branches of the government use taxpayer dollars…The GAO serves as a congressional watchdog over government spending.” It’s “an independent and non-partisan government agency.”
Likewise, Suffolk’s BRO is as its “mission statement” declares “the professional, non-partisan” entity with a “civil service staff that assists in the function of legislative oversight by reviewing and monitoring the budget for the legislature.”
The BRO not only critiques the county’s recommended annual Operating Budget and its Capital Program and Capital Budget—and the BRO reports are hundreds of pages long analyzing details of these spending programs. It reviews, as well, other county financial plans from proposed labor settlements to the yearly budget of Suffolk Community College and requested fare increases on ferries that run within the county.
Of all the directors of BRO through its 43 years—and as a journalist I’ve dealt with all them—Dr. Lipp has had the strongest academic credentials. Indeed, he has been a visiting professor at Stony Brook University where he received a doctorate in economics. (At Stony Brook he received an “Excellence in Teaching Award.”) After graduating from Stony Brook, he was a professor at Adelphi University for more than three years before deciding to join BRO.
A call to Dr. Lipp on any county fiscal subject results in tapping into a Suffolk official with an encyclopedic knowledge of county finances—able to provide information in seconds. Moreover, he is a straight-shooter personifying the word “non-partisan” in the BRO’s description of itself.
When his retirement was announced at the bi-weekly meeting of the Suffolk County Legislature on September 4, he was given a standing ovation.
He’s had a very hard year personally. His wife, Linda, died, and so did his brother, Michael, as did a cousin, too. At 68, Dr. Lipp decided to retire.
He was director of BRO for seven years, on its staff for 35.
Also, in doing financial analyses for Suffolk in recent decades, he has been faced with a conflict between what he terms the “analytical and the political”—analyzing a program and its need and what politically could be done. The key issue here is what has become the increasing dependence by Suffolk through the years on a sales tax—a variable source of government income. New York State first adopted a state sales tax in 1965. Then Suffolk began a county sales tax in 1969. Of Suffolk’s $3 billion annual operating budget, now half is dependent on sales tax money.
The sales tax rate in Suffolk now is 8.625 percent—which includes the state getting 4 percent and Suffolk 4.25 percent. (The MTA gets the remaining fraction.)
In years that are flush, when business is good and there’s “a gravy train,” Mr. Lipp commented, all is OK. But that’s not always the situation. In “the last quarter of 2008 and all of 2009,” Dr. Lipp was noting last week, sales tax revenues didn’t come in as expected, Suffolk and the rest of the U.S. were hit by the Great Recession. And Suffolk had a “negative growth rate.” Said Dr. Lipp about the ups-and-downs of sales tax revenue: “It’s a real problem.” And this “is not a recent revelation.” Decades ago there was the view that depending on a sales tax “was asking for trouble.”
In response, the county has done borrowing, and the payments on millions of dollars in debt that’s due makes financing many new and important county initiatives difficult if not impossible.
Dr. Lipp and his late wife had three daughters—two of whom live on the island of Maui in Hawaii. He enjoys visiting them, one a high school mathematics teacher, the other the director for a health care provider—which connects to the subject of his doctoral thesis at Stony Brook: health economics. He mentions that an “interesting aspect” of the findings in his thesis was that “in any single-payer health care system there is a safety valve and people who have the money can get to the front of the line.” A third daughter has remained on Long Island and is an art school director.
At Stony Brook his courses have included Health Economics, Public Finance, and Regional Economics. He has taught what he very much knows.
Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.