The Journal News from White Plains, New York • Page 9

cTournAbXcUis VIEWPOINTS I OA ROCKLAND COUNTY, N.Y.. MONDAY, APRIL 21, 1980 YOUR VIEW LURIE'S VIEW Easing the local government burden three months it has settled about $25,000 for a given year. I strongly believe that the federal and New York State governments and some appointed agencies must institute at least four changes to stop hurting local government: Overhaul and rewrite the New York State tax exemption laws. Stop writing unfunded mandated laws forcing local government to meet requirements beyond their financial capabilities. Stop the legal but immoral practice of cutting off funds at the end of higher government's fiscal year, but in the middle of local governments' fiscal year with no warning.

This was the case with the federal government's handling of anti-recession funds. After all, local government had already budgeted this item as an anticipated revenue. Stop appointed agencies from acting so autonomously and have them listen more closely to the people, as you and I must do. We would not be having the fluoridation fight if this was being done. Until these types of things are done, Nyack and, I am sure, most other villageswill need all the help they can get.

Don't make real "grass roots" government second rate. Help us find solutions to our problems. ALVOLK Nyack The writer, a Nyack village trustee, presented the preceding as a statement to the County Legislature on April 15 at a public hearing held to consider rescinding the local law allowing this county to collect delinquent village taxes and reimburse the villages for the delinquent amount. To the Editor: A resolution requesting the County of Rockland to collect delinquent taxes for the Village of Nyack, starting with the year 1979, was adopted unanimously on June 14, 1979, at a regular Nyack Village Board meeting. As an elected trustee in Nyack, I support the continuation of Rockland County's collection of delinquent village taxes.

My first concern must be to those I represent. The Village of Nyack, less than a mile square, has only approximately 1,400 taxpayers. Based on the June 1979 through 1980 budget, Nyack has the following: Total real property. tax-exempt property, $13,263,055 (this includes New York State, U.S. government, religions, cemetery, charitable, hospital, educational, firehouses, YMCA and American Legion).

Other exemptions are $3,302,373 (senior citizen, veteran and ministerial exemptions, Tallman Towers middle income, DePew Manor senior citizen and the Waldron Terrace low-income projects). Nyack's total taxable property is $54,469,418. The result is obvious. While Nyack's total property is over $71 million, its taxable property is under $54' million. The other $16'a million is tax-exempt.

This is a 23.3 percent tax exemption rate. We in Nyack have no control over 80 percent of these exemptions. The ones we do control are there in an effort to help our residents, who are mostly low to middle income, to meet their needs. Our delinquent taxes normally run in the area of $50,000. Usually we find that within two to Finalist for a Pulitzer -fa RIVER'S EDGE By Bob Boird OUR VIEW Fraud weapons SOMETHING OF a breakthrough has been accomplished in nailing welfare clients who cheat the government and the taxpayers.

The state's computerized system to catch social services fraud is now operating at a level of efficiency where it is saving more money than it costs. People who hide jobs and other sources of income in order to remain on welfare are spotted by the computer and removed from the rolls. Now all we have to worry about is somebody coming along with a budget-snipping scissors who will contend that the war is won and there is no need to keep all that expensive computer weaponry. Or, at the other end of the scale, watch out for the computer salesmen who may try to sell the state on more sophisticated computers that might do a marginally better job at far from marginally higher expense. Let leave this fragile success story as it is.

Actually, the state had to use a figure of $36.4 million in total taxpayer savings (including state, federal and local taxes) to balance the $23.1 million cost of the system. The actual saving in state taxes specifically was only $9.1 million. So, we really haven't paid the bill for those computers. WHILE AT IT, let's not forget that the cheats we're detecting with our computers are those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder. Fraud is inexcusable, but it goes on at every level in private and public situations.

The poor, moreover, aren't in a position to use the same kinds of dodges, calculated waste, union leverage and Parkinson's Law applications as many others who aren't exactly worried about where their next paycheck is coming from. Maybe some day we'll have a computer that will make money for us by attacking those "higher" kinds of fraud and cheating. The unopen court BRONX DISTRICT Attorney Mario Merola merits support in speedily appealing a puzzling decision by a Bronx judge that closed pretrial hearings involving three reputed high-level organized crime figures. The closing itself was questionable under the state Court of Appeals ruling of last November that substantially agreed that court proceedings should be open to the public. The puzzling aspect to state Supreme Court Justice Ivan Warner's closure decision is that just two weeks before he had ringingly defended the "responsibility" of the news media as he refused to close a pretrial hearing for a South Bronx street gang member.

A fortnight later, the judge was saying that only the defendant has the "absolute right" to decide on a "public trial." He also apparently failed to ob-: serve Court of Appeals guidelines requiring that the defense make the closure application in open court and that the press be given an opportunity to respond. "He even barred me when they were discussing 1- whether or not to bar me," said an ousted reporter. Different cases require different judgments, but this fast switch by Justice Warner requires more explanation. The public's right to observe the work-I ings of the court system should not be taken lightly or treated arbitrarily. Haverstraw youth agency rates high Since the state Legislature restored all proposed cuts in the Division for Youth's local aid and the governor has not vetoed these restorations, Haverstraw will be able to receive almost $30,000 for the Juvenile Aid Bureau in 1980.

I hope the village maintains this fine operation, at least at its present level. DENNIS J. FLEMING New City The writer is executive director of the Rockland County Youth Bureau. To the Editor: Apparently, because of just its name perhaps, the Juvenile Aid Bureau in the Village of Haverstraw is in danger of being closed in the spirit of saving money for the citizens. The Juvenile Aid Bureau is an integral component of the police department.

It is quite necessary these days for such a unit to meet the special needs of youth. The officers are not simply plainclo-thesmen. They are active in the community through their Police Athletic League chapter that operates in their storefront operation on North Broadway. This chapter, just organized in 1978 (when the Police Athletic League was starting) has won the most medals of any local chapter and has created an improved environment in their volunteer-built basement gym. These officers have diverted many young people from the courts, which in turn saved the additional costs for the courts and detention facilities.

The Juvenile Aid Bureau has also helped reduce the rate of juvenile crime, especially vandalism. It has solved many cases involving those under the age of 21 through its numerous formal and informal relationships established with young people. Juvenile Aid Bureaus (there are three town and two other village Juvenile Aid Bureaus in Rockland) were all started by federal funds namely, through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. This paid almost all costs (about 90 percent) during their early years of operation. The Juvenile Aid Bureaus are then funded 50-50 through the state Division for Youth if certain mandated criteria are met.

The Haverstraw Juvenile Aid Bureau has been highly rated by all parties involved and is considered to be one of the best in the lower Hudson Valley region. Eldorado's show To the Editor: Eldorado's first grade performance of "The Elephant Child" by Rudyard Kipling Wednesday night, April 16, certainly was a fine example of what the East Ramapo school system can be proud. The teachers, Mrs. Plant, Mrs. Lie-man, Mrs.

Wanderman, Mrs. Bearman and Mr. Eisenberg. did an excellent job of helping the children put on this entertaining performance. I am thankful to the teachers for giving their extra time so that I and other working parents could enjoy an evening show and see our children perforin.

As a parent of a first grader, I am pleased with the encouragement of the cultural and artistic as well as the excellent intellectual pursuits the Eldorado School has given my child in the first grade. MARION AMDUR Spring Valley There were no champagne corks popping and there was no party late into the night. It just wasn't that kind of day at The Journal-News last Monday. But it was a landmark in this newspaper's long history and a day for pride in accomplishment. Last Monday was Pulitzer Prize Day and our paper your paper was in the running for the most coveted prize in journalism.

In keeping with our nature as a local newspaper, the entry was in the special local reporting category. That's a category in which some of the biggies like the New York Times. Los Angeles Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer get to show off their best efforts, projects that sometimes take mountains of time, money and effort to produce. So there we were, up against the biggest and the best. And.

it turns out, we had a shot. Our entry was the five-part series by reporter Judy Grande and city editor Brian Gallagher, "Getting Away With Murder." Like many of the other entries, the series was in the works for a year, but unlike many others, it was written and edited by two people. The series came about with an assignment from Gallagher to Grande to look into how Rockland police agencies handled homicides in the 1970s. It was clear many cases were unsolved and it seemed just as clear that the only killers who ever came to justice were those caught standing over the victim's body or those who came forward and admitted their guilt. With that assignment, Grande began to comb records, read clips of newspaper accounts, interview police and track down relatives of the 62 people killed in Rockland over a 10-year period.

Hours on the phone. Days looking over records. Weeks gathering facts. More weeks editing and rewriting. All along the way she worked closely with Gallagher, who directed the day-today reporting and research, developed the final form for the project and wrote parts of the series during the editing process.

The series grew in scope and in depth as it was researched, written and edited over the course of a year. By the time of its publication in November, "Getting Away With Murder" had grown to cover 14 full newspaper pages with five main stories, 23 secondary stories and numerous charts and graphic elements. For Grande and Gallagher, it was a daily project for most of the year. For the last two months, both were detached from other duties to concentrate on the final writing and editing of the most ambitious project ever undertaken by The Journal-News. What began as a study of police handling of homicides had grown into a sweeping investigation of the entire criminal justice system and we found that system flawed at almost every stage.

Police seldom caught a suspect; if caught, the suspect seldom went to trial, thanks to prosecutors' willingness to plea bargain. When killers were sentenced, we found the sentences were short and parole authorities almost eager to let killers free at the first opportunity. While the Gallagher-Grande team had done the reporting and editing, no story comes alive on a newspaper page without a "laying on of hands" by many people. Gallagher spotted the possibilities for charts and graphs and set chief photographer Warren Inglese and staff artist John Cornell to work on those elements. Grande developed information for the largest chart I have ever seen in a newspaper.

After three weeks of typesetting by Fred Fix of the composing room staff, the chart covered more than a full newspaper page and documented each homicide from beginning to end. Special-effect photos were given over to Doug Allen and Chuck Cuccia to process in theii own imaginative and caring way. A press crew ran off a test of our graphics ideas. Lawyers and proofreaders pored over the final version of stories. At last, the entire package landed on my desk and I designed the pages as they appeared in your newspaper each evening for five days.

In the composing room, Rich Kane was detached from other duties to put together the type and photos in their finished form. All through the project assistant city editor Chris Carroll took over for Gallagher and shouldered the day-to-day responsibilities of the city editor. Now, five months later, the memories are a bit faded. But the key-beyond the work done by Gallagher and Grande was the united effort that went on throughout By the The Journal-News. And it goes on each and every dav Since September that effort has brought the newspaper five statewide Associated Press awards and two awards for continuing excellence from the New York State Publishers Association.

One of these was won by Gallagher for an editorial following the murder series; the other went to Grande and reporter Dave Colton for coverage of landfill problems in Ramano. But then we heard a rumor. Grande and Gallagher were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. That was in mid-March. The wait for April 14 was long and tense for many of us.

Would we win? Was the rumor incorrect? If we did end up among the finalists would we know for sure? Then came the word for the first time in Pulitzer history, finalists would be announced along with the winners. At 3:05 p.m. the bulletin moved on the Associated Press wires. The Pulitzer Prize gold medal the most prestigious award-had been given to the Gannett News Service for its series on the financial problems of the Pauline Fathers. The Journal-News, a Gannett newspaper, had published that extensive series last fall.

Category-by-category the winners came. We were not among them. By 4 p.m. the finalists were coming in on the news wires. In our category the award went to the Boston Globe.

The finalists were the Washington Post, the Long Island newspaper Newsday, the Port Arthur, News, and, yes, there it was. Rockland Journal-News. The reaction was quiet. It seemed most had come to be resigned to being bridesmaid rather than bride. While our series did not win the Pulitzer, finishing in the final five is something we can all look to with pride.

For Grande and Gallagher it is recognition that their work was among the very finest in America in 1979. Certainly, awards are not the only indication of a paper's worth to its readers or its community. But awards do serve to indicate that, judged against the toughest competition, measured against the most exacting standards, a newspaper is doing its job in a professional way. In that way, being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize is valuable. It tells the editors and reporters that their efforts are worthy of consideration alongside those of the finest journalists in America.

It tells them they do their job well in the eyes of their peers. In this case The Journal-News and a small Texas paper were in there against three of the finest large newspapers. It's an indication that talented journalists in any newsroom in this nation can rise to the top of their profession if they apply themselves. And that editors must be willing to make a commitment to the time and eflort that went into Getting Away With That's what this honor means to us in the newsroom. What does it mean to you.

the reader, in your living room'' It means there are committed people working on your daily newspaper. It means reporters and editors do a professional job of seeking out the truth and reporting it. It means you can expect the finest newspaper possible each and every day. That's what you deserve, and that's what we try 365 days a year to deliver. We are proud this week.

Proud of Judy Grande and Brian Gallagher. We are proud of this newspaper and proud of the job we do. We are proud that we do it lor you. Bob Baird is managing editor of The Journal 'ews. Others gains in energy independence Ronald Reagan has picked up the endorsement of 17 of New Jersey's 21 Republican county chairmen.

Reagan's organization probably will remember the missing four more clearly than the 17 who came through. A report says the squeeze on bank-issued credit cards stands to benefit department, chain and speciality stores that can afford to offer their own credit cards. That, in the charge-it routine, is just about where we all came in. Alaska has abolished its income tax and will pay residents cash dividends from the state's growing oil wealth. Before you pack, check out Alaskan prices; they make the "lower 48" look like a bargain basement.

In Moscow, a newspaper story says the CIA will try to undermine the summer Olympics. The Soviets have already done a pretty good job of that themselves. State Department of Energy have been particularly backward in their approach to the energy problem. Just one fact that might open your eyes: In 1880, there were 22 million acres of land under cultivation in New York State; in 1980, there are only Vi million acres under cultivation. Fast winter crops that get their nutrition from the air (kuzdu, for one) ran supply 10 to 50 percent of our energy, dependent upon the extent of our conservation program.

IRVING DEUTSCH, P.E. Monsey To the Editor: Raphael Gould (letter April 11, 'Energy independence is attainable is so right, but he only scratched the surface of the benefits we will obtain from making ourselves energy independent. Not only do we solve the 20 percent inflation rate and 20 percent interest rate problems, but we solve the problems of unemployment, welfare, crime, land deterioration, dollar outflow and halt the in-cursion of foreign investment and influence in the United States that are against the best interest of this nation. Gov. Hugh Carey and the New York way to aid handicapped parkers Friitni-- signs.

It is an imposition on those who di Editor: signs. It is an imposition on those who do eljc 53 Hudson Avenue, Nyack, Y. 358-2200 Vol. 90 No. 337 Barrv Hoffman Robert J.

Boird To the leave these spaces open that the wrong Managing Editor Et Editor General Manager (mi 200 people are permitted to park there. I think a sizable fine would be an appropriate deterrent and would eliminate the necessity for the towing that Yates claims to have done. His argument that handicapped persons do not always have proper parking permits is ridiculous. The permits are available from the Motor Vehicle Bureau when the need exists. My thanks to The Sunday Journal-News for this enlightening article on April 6.

ELAINE WODICKA New City I wonder if Chuck Yates, the Nanuet Mall manager, has considered the attitudes of mall patrons on observing non-handicapped drivers in these spaces clearly designated for the handicapped? I was of the opinion that the police were lax in ticketing those cars whose drivers are so lacking in concern for the needs of the handicapped. The reality of Yates preventing enforcement of these long overdue, conscionable laws is deplorable. The public is becoming aware of the special needs of the handicapped and I believe thinking people observe these Evening Journal eitobluhod 1889. DonV-Newi 1915 comol.dotecj Publitried doily and Sunday at The Journal -New Building. Rome 903, Wtit Nyock, by Weitctieiter Rockland Newjpoperl.

One Gannett Drive, White Plaint. Y. Brian J. Donnelly. Preiident and PubSiher.

One Gannett Drive, White Plami, Thomot I Chappie, Secretory; Paul A Mokowiki, Treoturer, One Gannett Drive, White Plant, zt Gannett Xrwtpaprr Brian J. Donnelly P-eudent and PuWiiher 694 5152 Paul A. Makowski Vice Prmdent. Controller 694 5171 Richard A. Ahlstrom Vice Preiident, Production Director 694 5161 John E.

Sheils Vict Prouder Personnel 694 SIM Joseph M. Ungaro Vice Prewd it Executive Editor 694 5002 Sheldcn Lyons Vice 'render. Advertitmg Director 694 5157 Robert Ernsiek Vice Prouder. Circwkinon Director 494 5145 Letters of not more than 400 words relating to the annual electlond and budget votes May 7 in the Nanuet, Ramapo Central and South Orangetown school districts must be received at the Nyack office of The Journal-News by noon Wednesday, April 30, for publication through Saturday, May 3. Letters 4.

ill a. I l. If An tint A. received at deadline will be acceptea tor puDiicauon oniy 11 wcy re MEMBER Of THE ASSOCIATfD PRESS MEMBER Of UNITED PRESS IRNATIONAl quire a right to reply..