The mood was uneasy at best at the Nassau County Legislature in Mineola on Wednesday, Oct. 29, where lawmakers hosted a raucous public hearing before they voted 10-9 along party lines to approve the $2.6 billion 2009 budget.

For the first time in five years, it included a 3.9 percent property tax increase, about $58 per household, in addition to nearly $30 million in spending cuts.

But no decisions were to be made until after the lawmakers listened to the room full of outraged union members. With more than 200 in attendance, Nassau County Police Department’s crossing guards came out in force, chanting “Put Our Children First,” and “Who’s Crossing Your Children?”

They were protesting a last minute budget proposal to cut the crossing guards’ summer hours, effectively leaving a large number of the 430 mostly female staff without pay—although the county promised uninterrupted benefits—for the three months that school is out. Some guards have duties for houses of worship and those schools with summer sessions. The guards, who are among the county’s lowest paid workers and work 20 hours a week, will also have the hours spent on clerical duties in police stationhouses cut under the proposal, resulting in an approximately 12 hour workweek for the guards. Additionally, 19 vacant crossing guard positions will not be filled. The new budget’s cuts to the crossing guards total $1 million.

Several of the legislators complained that it was “underhanded” that they had not seen the proposal until “the eleventh hour,” but administration officials from County Executive Tom Suozzi’s office countered that the economic crisis calls for extreme measures. “The world has changed” since Suozzi released his draft of the budget on Sept. 15, says Deputy County Executive Thomas Stokes, referring to the week that Wall Street went into a tailspin. Many municipal budgets have been slashed as a result of decreased tax revenues.

No crossing guards will be removed from their assigned crossing posts, but with the reduced hours there was speculation that many will now be forced to find other jobs. CSEA President Jerry Laricchiuta refers to cut hours as a layoff, a term which became a point of contention throughout the day.

“It might not technically be one if you look it up in the dictionary, but it’s a layoff as far as I’m concerned,” Laricchiuta says.

“All these decisions are difficult for me, but there aren’t any alternatives that I see,” says Nassau County Police Commissioner Lawrence Mulvey. Cops will have to prioritize and “do more with less” in order to take care of their own clerical work now, he says, as those in attendance booed and yelled out comments in the background, mostly suggesting that the county cut wages from top administrators instead.

Mulvey angered the crossing guards when he said during his testimony, “some of it was ‘nice to have’ kind of clerical work,” adding that “some of the work is not critical.” Several of the crossing guards who testified after the commissioner were nearly in tears as they described their clerical duties as a necessity to keep investigators from being bogged down in paperwork and said they do more than alphabetize files, as some critics suggested.

Mulvey also says that he is “fairly confident” that Safety Town will be saved by private donations, referring to the kid-sized traffic education facility in Eisenhower Park where third graders go on field trips. Laricchiuta countered that he will file a grievance to ensure the seven crossing guards that staff the facility are not reassigned.

The vote comes on the same day that New York Gov. David Paterson made a plea for Congress to pass another economic stimulus package, this time including aid for state budgets. Paterson announced on Oct. 28 that the state faces a projected $47 billion budget gap over the next four years as a result of Wall Street’s woes.