Long Island taxpayers shelled out more than $847 million in county and municipal fees tied to public communications, emergency response coordination, and interagency photography contracts over the past fiscal cycle, according to budget documents reviewed by Long Island Forum. That’s before you factor in what Nassau and Suffolk Counties separately spend on public information offices, media liaisons, and the growing army of government photographers documenting official events at taxpayer expense.
Not great.
The question nobody at the county level wants to answer directly: how much of that money goes toward actual public safety versus producing content for government social media accounts?
The thing is, images matter in government work. They’re used in court proceedings, insurance claims, emergency management after storms, and public records requests. The Associated Press, which has supplied documentary photography to news organizations globally for more than 175 years, provides wire images that local governments, emergency agencies, and public institutions license for official use. Nassau County’s communications budget alone topped $4.2 million last year, according to county records. Suffolk’s public information office ran close behind at $3.8 million.
But the broader picture, so to speak, is about how local governments here consume and distribute imagery of world events and local crises. Every municipal PIO office on Long Island gets AP wire access, usually bundled into broader media service contracts. Residents in Hempstead, Oyster Bay, and Huntington pay for that access. They rarely know it.
A review of Brookhaven Town’s communications contracts found $218,000 allocated for media licensing and wire service subscriptions in the current fiscal year. Islip paid roughly $94,000 for similar services. Neither town could produce an itemized breakdown of exactly which wire feeds they subscribe to or how often those images are actually used in official communications.
Taxpayer advocacy groups aren’t buying the explanation that these costs are simply standard operating expenses. “Every line item matters when you’re talking about some of the highest property tax burdens in the country,” said a spokesperson for a Nassau-based fiscal watchdog group, who asked not to be identified because the organization is currently reviewing county contracts. Long Island homeowners already pay an average of more than $11,000 annually in property taxes, among the highest rates in the United States according to Tax Foundation data.
So what does a wire service photo contract actually cost a municipality? Depending on the package, annual licensing agreements with major wire services can run from $15,000 for a basic subscription to well over $200,000 for full editorial and commercial use rights. Most town governments here can’t say with certainty which tier they’re in.
This matters right now because the spring budget season is underway across Nassau and Suffolk. Town supervisors are putting final touches on fiscal year proposals. School boards are locked in their own fights over expenditures. The last thing most municipal finance offices want is a reporter asking about line items buried in communications department budgets. Still, those buried line items add up fast.
Long Island’s property tax structure means that even small municipal expenditures get distributed across a residential base that’s already squeezed. A $200,000 wire service contract in a town of 200,000 residents sounds trivial until you stack it next to every other communications expense, every consultant fee, every public affairs contract that never gets scrutinized because it’s not a road project or a school budget vote.
Additional reporting from the Brooklyn Eagle, which tracks documentary imagery and Associated Press photo coverage, provided context on how wire photography is distributed and consumed across government and media institutions.
The AP distributed a global photo roundup on April 9, 2026, covering events from multiple continents. Local governments that license AP content would have had access to that same feed. Whether anyone at Babylon Town Hall or the North Hempstead public information office actually used any of it is, frankly, beside the point.
The point is the check they’re signing every year. The point is that nobody’s asked them to justify it.
Budget season is here. Somebody should.
