Now that we've pulled off our little joke on the rest of the state, secured our aid package from Albany, it's safe for Nassau residents to come clean.

We never had a budget crisis in Nassau County. Never happened.

What we've had in Nassau County is not a budget crisis. It's been a leadership crisis which transformed an unspectacular budget gap into a serious Wall Street crisis in about four years.

The current string of budget gaps goes back to 1995 and it could have been snapped at any time had county leaders been willing to break doctrine, show a little backbone and raise revenues a little at a time to cover increased expenses. And we're talking about really small tax increases. The budget imbalance in Nassau is to this day smaller than that which Suffolk County experienced in the late '80s. Smaller than the one North Hempstead had in the mid-'90s. Smaller than budget disasters in Troy, in Yonkers, in Glen Cove as recently as 1993. Nassau's bush league antics just piled up until Wall Street blew its whistle, calling a halt before we lost the real powers that be, in this state, any money.

Raise taxes? Never. Why not? Two words: Patrick Halpin. Elected county executive in Suffolk in 1987, he was forever branded "High Tax Halpin" by Republicans after he tried to fix a chronic inherited budget mess in one fell swoop. What's not often remembered, besides Halpin's defeat to a strong candidate in 1991, is that he, in fact, did solve the chronic inherited budget mess. Halpin had a public relations problem and handled it badly, but he was a good county executive. Tom Suozzi in Glen Cove inherited a true budget crisis when he became mayor in 1994, raised taxes, made the effort to act like an adult about it, explained it intelligently and pulled it off. If county taxes had been raised a little bit a couple of times in the late '90s, we wouldn't be carving up vital social support operations today.

Frankly, we haven't helped educate our leaders about our own maturity. For example, Executive Tom Gulotta hasn't received due credit for having the guts to propose and push through an unpopular tax, the repealed real estate transfer tax, that would have gone a long way to plug budget gaps. In the 1980s, the same tax was proposed for Nassau townships and received Democratic backing. The demonizing of this proposal last year was less reasoned than partisan.

There are still county legislators in both party conferences who are suggesting privately that the best political course is to punt, let a state control board make the tough decisions and spend its time blaming the other party. Both parties should clamp down on this craven thinking right now.

Now that we've had our little fun and our free ride, let's let lawmakers know that we can take it like adults. The budget gap benefited Nassau residents and now we may have to pay a price for it. Just like grown-ups.