(Ed Note: The following letter was addressed to Mr. Tom Suozzi, Nassau County Executive, and is printed here at the author's request.)

Recently, a Nassau County Police Department Highway patrol officer was in the parking lot of 1600 Stewart Avenue, Westbury. The building and parking lot is private property.

Yet, the officer issued a summons to a parked car. The owner and driver, a disabled veteran, was parked in a disabled parking space. The owner and driver possesses a New York State Handicap Parking Permit. The permit was not visible due to falling out of sight.

However, such a permit requirement does in fact violate the Americans With Disabilities Act, a federal law giving persons with a handicap preferential access to and within buildings and giving those persons with vehicles, in parking lots available to them, parking spaces as designated under this law.

This law does not require a permit to utilize a handicap parking space.

In fact, in New York State, there are few public parking lots or fields, in or around business property, that are owned by the state or county or town. Therefore, enforcement of the state, county or town law regarding the Handicap Parking Spaces on private property is a violation of the US Constitution. It is seizure by government of private property (the handicap parking space) without compensation to the property owner.

To condone this activity in New York, is to permit a police officer to enter your residential driveway to check that your vehicle has the latest registration and emissions certificate and upon finding an expired one, issuing a summons for it.

The Nassau County Police Commissioner just complained that $4.6 million worth of his officers' time was used answering false alarm calls; how many were business alarm calls?

Well, when an officer who earns upward of $80,000, plus benefits, is used as a parking lot attendant by the commissioner for an agenda of monitoring private property parking spaces, I find that to be inappropriate and may even be illegal use of the county's police department in that of monitoring the parking facilities of a private entity.

Arnold Johnson