Peter Applebome’s “Our Towns” column in today’s Times encapsulates conventional wisdom about the cause of high property taxes in New York City’s suburban counties.  While tipping his hat to the power of public employee unions, Abblebome gets distracted by some of the usual suspects.

The Nassau County executive, Thomas R. Suozzi, whose “Fix Albany” mantra got him nowhere when he ran for governor against Eliot Spitzer in 2006 … cites several reasons why property taxes are so high: unreasonable state mandates piled on local governments; income tax dollars inequitably distributed back to local governments; far too many local governments — more than 10,500 in New York — that need to be consolidated or eliminated; fraud and waste; and economic stagnation producing no expansion in the property tax base. You could throw in crippling Medicaid costs and unsustainable pension costs.

In fact, the “unreasonable mandates” in question are those that tilt collective bargaining rules in favor of unions, especially provisions of the Taylor Law.  This was duly noted in last year’s report by a property tax relief commission Suozzi chaired — although Suozzi himself tends to sidestep the labor factor in his jeremiads against Albany.

If Applebome wants a better idea of what’s driving taxes in Suozzi’s backyard, he ought to pay a visit to the salary data section of www.SeeThroughNY.net and peek at the regional pay rankings in this recent Empire Center summary of county and municipal payrolls.  He’ll find that six-figure salaries are becoming the norm for teachers and cops in a large number of Long Island communities–and that the highest average salaries, overall, are concentrated in the heavily taxed Long Island and the lower Hudson Valley.   The 20 highest-paid county and municipal government employees in the state included two police officers in the Rockland County town of Clarkstown who cleared more than $200,000 and three who made more than $300,000, topped by a captain whose retirement and disability payout last year came to $543,416.  (That is not a misprint.)

Applebome’s piece also repeats that hoariest of myths:

[W]e’ve come to expect good services — top-rated schools, nearby police in little boutique towns — and have been willing to pay for them.

Correction: residents of New York’s tri-state suburban counties have come to expect services that are more expensive but in no measurable way better than those of equally affluent suburbs in nearby states (say, Montgomery County, Maryland).  It will, indeed, be interesting to see if they start voting like they care.