By Ari Brown

The Herald has long understood what too many in Albany still refuse to accept: Long Island is not New York City.

We have different priorities. We live differently. We raise our families differently. We work for a living. Yet year after year, Albany treats us as an afterthought while pouring resources and political energy into the five boroughs.

I have one guiding principle in the Assembly: Long Island comes first. Not Republican first. Not Democrat first. Long Island first.

That philosophy is why voters in the 20th Assembly District, which has historically elected Democrats, continue to support me, and why the Conservative Party has given me a perfect 100 percent voting record. My constituents know I don’t ask whether an idea is liberal or conservative. I ask whether it’s good for the people who actually live here, pay the taxes and keep this place running.

People move to Long Island for safe neighborhoods, excellent schools, strong local government and towns where neighbors still know one another. They want to raise their children in communities from Inwood to Montauk and from Long Beach to Glen Cove, not under one-size-fits-all rules written for Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Albany keeps forgetting that. The latest example is the push to force local governments outside New York City to move elections to odd-numbered years. If this is such good policy, why is New York City exempt? Why do the mandates always fall on us while the city gets the carve-outs?

Now the pattern has reached a new low. Gov. Kathy Hochul just handed New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani roughly $8 billion in state aid and accounting maneuvers to bail out the city’s budget. Nearly $8 billion of taxpayer money, including money from Long Island families who work every day, to paper over City Hall’s fiscal mess.

While our roads deteriorate, our property taxes remain crushing and our local governments struggle under Albany’s mandates, the state found billions for New York City. That money should have been invested in the communities that actually live within their means. Instead it went to rescue a city government that can’t control its spending.

Mamdani’s record makes it worse. He has refused to clearly condemn “globalize the intifada,” associated with voices that minimize or excuse terrorism, and appointed a judiciary advisory committee with no Jewish members at a time of rising antisemitism. Sept. 11 families have made clear they do not want him at the 25th-anniversary ceremony. This isn’t leadership. It is a pattern that encourages division and hate.

America is built on the rule of law and equal justice. Those values are not optional. Long Islanders of every background still largely live by traditional American values: We are neighbors before we are partisans. When a family needs help, politics usually takes a back seat. That’s the culture I was elected to protect.

I didn’t go to Albany to serve as a junior partner to New York City, or to rubber-stamp bailouts for mayors who treat the suburbs as an ATM. I went to fight for the people of the 20th District, and for the suburban way of life that makes Long Island worth defending.

I call on my Long Island colleagues on both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans, to start working for Long Island and not for a party. Stop the bailouts. Stop the special treatment. Put Long Island first.

That is the job. That is the promise. And that is what I will keep doing.

Ari Brown represents the 20th Assembly District.