Monday night’s budget hearing in the Village of Great Neck Estates moved quickly. Maybe too quickly.
The Board of Trustees adopted a proposed 2025-26 budget with a 2.2% spending increase after giving residents nothing more than a brief verbal summary. No printed copies were handed out. No document appeared on the village website. And not a single resident spoke specifically about the budget before the board voted to approve it.
That’s not how public hearings are supposed to work.
The April 13 meeting, held at the Nassau County village, listed the budget hearing on its agenda. But attending residents had no way to review the numbers themselves, ask informed questions, or push back on specific line items. A public hearing without a public document is barely a hearing at all.
Trustee Ira D. Ganzfried, who also serves as the village’s budget director, told attendees that between 70% and 80% of the budget covers fixed costs tied to contracts and services, leaving officials with limited room to maneuver. Mayor William Warner called the 2.2% increase “pretty reasonable” given what he described as higher costs across the economy. That may well be true. But residents had no way to verify any of it.
The thing is, the transparency breakdown started before the meeting even began.
The Great Neck News Record requested a copy of the proposed budget from the village clerk’s office before the meeting. They were told it wasn’t available. They asked again right before the meeting started. Same answer. After the vote, they asked once more and inquired whether the document had been made available to the public at any point prior to adoption. Village Clerk Nicole Giacopelli said a tentative budget hearing notice had been “posted in the lobby,” adding “but nobody showed up.” No such posting was observed. The budget also wasn’t on the village’s website.
When a reporter pointed this out to Ganzfried, his response was striking. He said he “assumed it was posted online,” and when told it wasn’t, said simply, “I don’t check the site.”
He acknowledged that the budget should have been published. “The answer is it should be published,” Ganzfried said.
The mayor declined to comment.
[New York’s Open Meetings Law requires that public bodies give the public a reasonable opportunity to participate in decisions that affect them. Budget hearings exist precisely so residents can weigh in before a vote, not watch silently while officials summarize figures from memory.](https://dos.ny.gov/open-meetings-law) A 2.2% increase might sound modest. Still, without knowing what drives it, residents in Great Neck Estates can’t hold their elected officials accountable for where that money goes.
As of Tuesday morning, Long Island Press had still not received a copy of the budget document, which first reported this story. The village had not responded to questions about whether proper procedures were followed.
The meeting didn’t end with the budget vote, though. Residents raised a separate and more immediately alarming concern: a recent attempted break-in on Pine Drive. Village Police Sgt. Noor told the board that the case had been turned over to Nassau County Police Department for investigation.
“This is an ongoing investigation,” Sgt. Noor said. “What I can say at this time is that it’s a one-off incident.” The sergeant added that police don’t see a broader pattern of similar crimes in the village. Residents pushed back, asking about patrol visibility and whether they should be worried.
Whether that reassurance lands depends a lot on trust between a community and its local government. Right now, Great Neck Estates has a trust problem.
Officials adopted a spending plan that touches every household in the village, and they did it without letting those households see the numbers first. Ganzfried’s own admission that the budget should have been published before the vote suggests the village knows it fell short.
That’s a problem worth fixing before next year’s hearing. Post the document. Put it on the website. Give residents more than a verbal summary and a raised hand. The process exists for a reason.