Newsday (Suffolk Edition) from Melville, New York • 31

30 v': Vanishing Services and SERVICES from Page 7 Newsday Wiles Stabile OFF CAMERA Empty studio at Long public TV station WLIW in Garden City where local programs were canceled because of budget cuts nalized their budget plans have many of those cutbacks begun to be felt The physical plant from parks to motor vehicle offices will deteriorate say the people responsible for maintaining it Enforcement of state rules and regulations will weaken say the enforcers A variety of services will simply lag behind their already slow rates And in areas such as arts funding state cutbacks translate into a triple threat by driving down county and town funding as well PHYSICAL DETERIORATION In state parks peeling paint litter and crumbling boardwalks threaten to become the norm continuing the process by which the Montauk Pool closed last year because of disrepair clean the comfort stations as said Ronald Foley regional parks director pick up the trash as often Building maintenance is suffering dramatically You paint as often as you did years ago In some places the parks are falling apart If you look at the main building at Caleb Smith State Park most of the paint is laying on the Already the parks region has delayed $3 million in equipment purchases over the last three years and canceled orders in the last year alone for 1200 steel trash receptacles 300 wire baskets 330 picnic table frames and 160 picnic grills State buildings will suffer similar declines think the general public can see the effect said Thomas Tubbs spokesman for the Office of General Services can walk around buildings and see more litter around than a few months ago You can see that walking up an escalator instead of riding on Actually you may not be able to see as well as all that the state has been replacing 100-watt bulbs with 60-watt ones first day you notice it but in ensuing days you get used to it like anything Tubbs said And for people who have to be there all day even worse: The air-conditioning in state offices is being shut off before the end of the day and a memo went out forbidding the use of fans because they raise the electric bill OVERSIGHT AND ENFORCEMENT There has been a very dangerous climate and some of the legislators seem to be buying to fund local counties towns and villages at half the rate it did just ayear ago leading localities to go through transformations of their own and adding to the cumulative impact on each resident of the state going to have to change as simple as said Kevin Braddish head of the Long Beach city council which has already cut back its garbage collections by a third have to learn how to say no to said Islip Supervisor Frank Jones who contemplates scaling back the efforts against illegal two-family homes among other measures is a limit to what you can do with limited said David Harris Suffolk health commissioner Egypt the pharoahs asked the Israelites to make bricks out of straw But even the pharoahs could not ask them to make bricks without To Elaine Ingram the inspector for bingo roulette and other games of chance closing down her office and laying off all four people who work in it called into question what good it had done to pay her salary for the last 12 years a couple of years it will be back to the way it was before said Bonita Kaufman the office secretary' Added Ingram alleviated problems just by being there The people getting their worth if gone State officials necessarily disagree with that sentiment but they agree on how to do anything about it either The state agencies bore the brunt of an unusually hostile budget standoff between Gov Mario Cuomo and legislative leaders with the legislature responding to unwillingness to compromise on spending by slashing the funds of the agencies he controls by $270 million beyond his own cuts Only $43 million of that was ultimately restored That left each agency to grapple with how to make its bottom line and officials say the adversarial nature of the process that led to the final numbers only made that more difficult Only in recent weeks as agencies fi into it that somehow the notion of oversight and surveillance and regulation is overzealous in New said Lani Sanjek of the Statewide Senior Action Council a lobbying group is very difficult to accept this just an unacceptable The State Health Department for instance has already begun spending only half as long as it originally planned to conduct what it calls of hospitals a move that makes even its own officials nervous "Protection will be lessened" said Fred Heigel director of hospital services Will patients be jeopardized? The Department of Environmental Conservation will only track half as many medical waste disposals as last year The Public Transportation Safety Board which investigates safety practices of the Long Island Rail Road and the subways will have to shorten the investigations of about half of all accidents and do less accident analysis to detect dangerous trends Statewide housing inspectors are being cut back and so are investigators of alleged human rights violations The human rights division is so far behind that it has created a special backlog unit to deal with cases more than two years old and even that is being cut back The Department of State will not publish its second annual and and lists aimed at frustrating racial blockbusting by real estate agents the lists cover more than 7000 homes on Long Island SLOWDOWNS In the courts there enough money to keep all the civil courtrooms open People pressing civil lawsuits will have to wait longer for their day in court criminal defendants ordered to do community service may be told to wait or turned away altogether and it will take longer for a complaint about a bad judge to be heard if investigated at all The chief judge Sol Wachtler has threatened to sue the executive and legislative branches of government if the courts are rendered financially incapable of doing their job While justice in the courtrooms slows down so will investigations into lack of justice The Commission on Judicial Conduct which investigates and adjudicates claims of judicial misconduct expects adjudication of cases to rise from its current average of 14 to 18 months Not only was the budget cut by almost 20 percent but overnight travel for investigators to watch judges in action has been eliminated making decisions with an eye on the said administrator Gerald Stern making judgments in part on the seriousness of the case There has to be more delay all the way down the The State Ethics Commission which checks elected financial disclosures has also been cut back and will take longer to conduct its reviews Meanwhile at Department of Motor Vehicles offices the lines will be getting longer and toll-free information numbers designed to help shorten the lines by helping car owners avoid them havb been shut down even though they received 28 million calls a year Waits for road test appointments are also expected to last an extra two weeks on top of the month it already take at most Long Island offices you seeing is in the progress we had made going to go a few steps back said department spokeswoman Gail Tyner-Taylor A hotline for information on breast cancer detection avoided a shutdown but was still trimmed part of the trims in the $2-million detection program in nine centers around the NEWSDAV THURSDAY AUGUST 8 1991 Newsday Don Jacobsen ODDS PEOPLE OUT At the New York State Racing and Wagering Board office in Hauppauge are from left Elaine Ingram Rose Marie Barry John Comiskey and Bonita Kaufman whose jobs were eliminated by budget cutting.