THE REAL REBECCA KASSAY .COM
She asked Long Island to send her to Albany to fight for us. Instead she sold us out, bailed out New York City, and voted to let developers pave over our neighborhoods. The swamp did not stay in Albany. It ran downhill to Suffolk County.
We sent her to Albany. She went to work for Albany.
Rebecca Kassay ran as an independent voice for Long Island. She has not cast a single vote that made Kathy Hochul uncomfortable. When the choice came down to Suffolk County or New York City, she chose New York City, and she did it in a budget that landed two months late.
What follows is sorted by what it costs you. Every entry traces to a roll call, a bill text, or a public meeting record.
What she does to your property taxes
She voted to raise property taxes past the legal limit. Then she asked for your vote as the affordability candidate.
She voted to let her village raise property taxes past the legal limit.
New York caps how much a local government can raise your property taxes each year. Rebecca Kassay voted to let Port Jefferson go over it. As a village trustee she was part of a 4-1 vote adopting a local law authorizing the village to exceed the state's 2% cap. Mayor Lauren Sheprow voted against it. The village treasurer told TBR News Media Port Jefferson had already gone over the cap in eight of the previous nine years, by anywhere from $8,000 to $380,000.
Then she campaigned as the person who would lower your costs.
The cap she voted to break exists to protect homeowners from exactly what Long Islanders are living through. New York ranks 50th out of 51 for state and local tax rates, with residents paying about 12.4% of their income in taxes, driven mostly by property and income taxes.
The New York City bailout
New York City spent itself broke. She voted to make Long Island pay for it.
Budget bill A10008-C, signed May 26, 2026. Every item below was inside it.
She sold out Long Island to bail out New York City.
New York City overspent and came up $12 billion short. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani cut a deal for nearly $8 billion in state help, and Rebecca Kassay voted for it. Roughly $3 billion of that is your tax money handed over as cash. The rest is permission for the city to put off bills it already owes. Long Island, which sends more to Albany than it gets back, received nothing remotely like it.
And the bailout does not even fix New York City. It just delays the bill.
The biggest piece of the deal lets the city skip payments it owes its own retirees and pay more later. The Empire Center found it saves New York City about $900 million a year through 2032 while costing more in the end. Even after all of it, the city expects to run short $7.1 billion, then $9.1 billion, then $9.8 billion. They will be back for more, and she will vote yes again.
The budget was two months late and passed in a single day.
Albany missed its own April 1 deadline by nearly two months, then pushed a $269 billion bill through both houses in one day. Nobody had time to read it. Kassay voted yes anyway.
Paving over Long Island
She campaigns as the environmentalist. She voted to let developers drop apartment complexes into Long Island neighborhoods with no environmental study at all.
She voted to let developers build apartment complexes with no environmental study.
For fifty years, before anyone could put up a project in your neighborhood, they had to study what it would do: the traffic on your street, the strain on the water supply, the load on the schools. Neighbors got to see it and speak on it. Kassay voted to throw that out for most new multifamily housing. A developer can now put up as many as 100 apartments in most of the state without any of it. It is the biggest weakening of that law since the day it was written.
On Long Island, that means density, traffic and water, decided somewhere else.
Long Island has spent forty years fighting over how dense it should get and how much the aquifer can take. Kassay voted to remove the one step where those questions had to be answered in public. A coalition of Long Island environmental and civic groups warned the change would strip away public input and leave towns to "pick up the mess" once the traffic and the infrastructure costs arrive. The character of a neighborhood is not a technicality. It is the reason people moved here.
The environmental groups on her own side told her not to do it.
The people who spend their lives protecting Long Island's water and open space asked lawmakers to vote no. Kassay voted yes. They called the review law an "essential planning tool" and refused the argument that housing and clean water are a choice. An attorney for Save the Sound, which represents 4,400 households, called the loophole poorly drafted and overly broad, and pointed out the law does not require anyone to lower a single rent.
She voted to hand off Suffolk County land inside the same budget bill.
Buried in that budget was permission to lease out state land at Stony Brook and Farmingdale and to transfer state property in the Town of Babylon. Decisions about what gets built on Suffolk County ground were made in Albany, inside a budget bill, in a single day, with no local hearing and no local vote.
She wrote the bill that left the Greenway open to a highway
The bill Kassay wrote in 2025 did not protect the Greenway. It protected the state's right to build a bypass bridge over it. The text preserved the Department of Transportation's authority to build that bridge, required the MTA to build it to the state's specifications, and said outright that a rail yard and a bypass could sit on the same site. She pushed it through on the last day of session.
I felt very uncomfortableSuffolk County Executive Ed Romaine, on the 2025 Kassay bill and its proposed bridge over a possible highway bypass. TBR News Media.
Then she ran for reelection on the bill that cleaned up her own bill.
Neighbors read the first bill and raised the alarm. Only then did Kassay write a second one. That second bill put permanent protection on the 3.4 mile trail and was signed in July 2026. She has campaigned on it ever since. She does not mention the first one.
What she does to your energy bill
Long Island already pays some of the highest utility bills in America. She voted to make them higher.
She voted for a new charge that lands on your utility bill.
The budget lets the state fund its energy agency by billing the gas and electric companies. Utilities do not absorb costs like that. They pass them through as delivery charges, which is the line on your bill that has been climbing fastest.
She backs a plan that ends the guarantee of natural gas service to your home.
Right now, if you want gas heat, the utility has to hook you up. The NY HEAT Act repeals that guarantee. It also directs state regulators to draw up a plan for shutting down sections of the gas system neighborhood by neighborhood. Kassay is on record supporting it.
She voted to delay the report card on all of it until after the next election.
New York is supposed to publish an updated plan showing whether its climate mandates are working. The budget pushes that to 2028. She votes for the rules that raise your bills, then votes to put off the accounting.
What she does to public safety
Albany decided how Suffolk County police may work with federal agents. She voted with Albany.
She voted to stop Suffolk County from partnering with federal immigration agents.
Counties could sign agreements letting their own officers work directly with federal immigration authorities. Kassay voted to end them. Suffolk County did not get a say. The decision was made in Albany and applied here.
The state she keeps voting for
A million people have left New York. She keeps voting for the reasons they left.
Your neighbors are leaving, and the people replacing them earn less.
More than 1,045,000 people have left New York for other states since Kathy Hochul took office, including over 137,000 in a single recent year. The ones who left earned $68 billion more than the ones who arrived, with $14 billion of that income landing in Florida. Fewer people are left to carry the same bills. Kassay's answer was a budget that shipped $8 billion to New York City.
Long Island paid. New York City got paid. Kassay voted yes.
Every item here comes from a roll call, a bill text, or a public meeting record. None of it shows up in the mail she sends at your expense.
Read it. Then check it. The bill numbers are right there.
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