School tax cap, EV garage chargers, pensions

Towns feel the pinch that schools felt first

Since the state enacted its 2% tax cap in 2011, school districts in New York have had to navigate it [“Suffolk supervisors ask for tax cap formula change,” News, Oct. 6]. For years, they were told to deal with it and make hard choices, and that the cap was helping their communities. Now that it is starting to adversely affect Long Island town supervisors, it is suddenly untenable. Supervisors should deal with it and make some hard choices.

— Tom Sena, Merrick

This is exactly why there is a tax cap — to prevent governing entities from bankrupting taxpayers with excessive spending justified by flawed logic. The cap is doing what it is supposed to do.

I am sure that if 12 taxpayers from each town were given the task of lowering their town’s spending, they could all do so with relative ease. We don’t need 25 administrators, 100 free summer concerts and 50 free leaf bags, whatever the numbers are. We can make do with fewer.

— Carl Esposito, Huntington

Garage chargers work fine in many states

It seems that the municipal leaders of the Town of Babylon know little about electric vehicle charging, as evidenced by the rules they have proposed “EV charger regulations draw some static,” Our Towns, Oct. 9].

For starters, they want to ban chargers in public garages, even though thousands of chargers by Tesla, ChargePoint and other providers are in use in public garages across the country. For more than seven years, I have charged my EV at Level 2 and Level 3 chargers in many garages, including at Atlantic Center and Ikea in Brooklyn, in Worcester, Massachusetts, and in Burlington, Vermont. Are these places courting disaster? I doubt it.

If the town’s chief fire marshal, Anthony Cardali, fears fires that originate from charging equipment, the proposed regulations should require certifiably safe equipment installed by licensed electricians and subject to inspection. Instead, he wants to ban chargers on the front of buildings but apparently not the back, a restriction that doesn’t address those concerns.

For the good of Long Island’s EV drivers, I hope there is pushback against these proposals.

— Stephanie Doba, Sag Harbor

Government labor is worthy of pensions

I was offended by Matt Davies’ political cartoon about state pensions [Opinion, Oct. 1]. I worked for federal, state and local governments, the last for 32 years. My pension is modest, and I worked very hard for it. I was required to do jobs that many in the private sector would not do.

Civil servants protect and serve the very people who are bashing them and their jobs are no walk in the park. When I said I was going to work for Suffolk County some called me a fool because I could have made more money in the private sector.

Now those same people begrudge me my pension.

— Valerie Romeo, Bayport