How Nassau County Settles Lawsuits: 62 Resolutions, One Published Dollar Figure, and a Records Request

On September 22, 2026, this office’s routine read of the Nassau County Legislature’s calendars turned up five resolutions to settle lawsuits on one calendar, for the September 28, 2026 meeting. Nobody publishes the pattern: how many claims the county settles, and for how much. This study answers the first question from the county’s own documents and explains why the second is a records request away. Its reader is an Elmont woman who served a notice of claim on Nassau County after a fall on a county road and asked what claims like hers settle for. The county’s record cannot answer her.

Why this study exists

The county settles lawsuits in most months it meets, and the title of each settlement resolution is printed on a public calendar. What is not printed on any county page this study could reach is a list: no annual claims report, no ledger of settlements paid.

Here, the reading has been done once, for every calendar of 2025 and 2026. For the Elmont claimant the value is narrower. She now knows where her case will surface and who has to approve it, and that the number is the one thing the county’s pages will not give her before then. In practice, that lets her put her time into the filings that are hers to control.

Who approves a Nassau County settlement

The rule is local. Nassau County Administrative Code § 11-3.0(b) provides that the County Attorney “shall not be empowered to compromise, settle or adjust any rights, claims, demands or causes of action in favor of or against the County unless authorized by the Board of Supervisors acting by resolution,” and Charter § 102 provides that “Board of Supervisors” in the Administrative Code “shall be deemed to mean and refer to the County Legislature.” No dollar threshold appears in the text, and the rule runs both ways, which is why the table includes resolutions in which the county is the plaintiff.

The path is committee first, two weeks before the calendar. In my judgment the resolution calendar is the earliest public signal that a claim against the county is ending, months before any court file shows a discontinuance, and the committee agendas are earlier still. Consequently, a claimant whose case is settling should watch the committee agendas, and expect to find the caption there and nothing else.

How the data was gathered

The county’s Legislature meetings sit in an online index, the AgendaCenter. A search of it for the categories “County Legislative Full Meetings” and “County Legislature Special Meetings” returned 14 agendas for each year, and the file labeled “CALENDAR” on each agenda’s page lists the resolutions. Twenty-three calendars were saved, 13 for 2025 and 10 for 2026 through the September 28, 2026 meeting. The five 2026 agendas without one were an organizational meeting, a special meeting that posted only a public notice, and the three meetings after September 28, whose pages were still empty on September 22, 2026; the only gap in 2025 was a special meeting of the same kind. Each PDF was converted to text with pdftotext, and every request went to the county’s server one at a time, two seconds apart, under a standard browser user-agent string.

An item counted as a settlement resolution when its title contained “compromise and settle,” “settle the claim” or “settle the claims” (one calendar prints “CLAINS,” and the rule catches it), or “settlement of the claim, action, lawsuit or litigation.” A wider sweep for “settle,” “judgment” and “stipulation” found nothing the rule had missed.

Each resolution is one row. The caption is copied as printed, errors included, and so is the index number; the court is inferred from that number’s format alone, because the calendars never name it. An amount appears only where a county document states one, never estimated. A claim type appears only where a captured document states one. Every row’s status is “on calendar,” because no minutes or vote records could be obtained for any meeting.

No 2026 agenda page carries a resolution text, and the “Journal of Proceedings” link on the Clerk’s page leads to a retired portal. Consequently, all 31 amounts for 2026 are unverified, and the only route to them is a records request.

What the record shows

Sixty-two settlement resolutions appeared on 23 Full Legislature calendars: 31 in 2025, across 13 calendars, and 31 in 2026 through the September 28 calendar, across 10.

The County of Nassau or Nassau County appears in the caption of 54 resolutions, in two of them as the plaintiff. The Nassau County Police Department is a named defendant in four: Javaid, Farrell, Jiang and Sehgal. The other four name neither; one, a workers’ compensation claim, reads only “CLAIMANT.”

The record states one payment. Resolution No. 21-2025 (February 24, 2025), Hernandez v. County of Nassau, one of only two settlement resolutions whose text the county posted, recites an action “alleging personal injuries” settled for $350,000. The other posted text, Resolution No. 22-2025 on the same agenda page, carries $4,800,000 payable to the county, a recovery rather than a payment. No other figure appears in the record for either year.

All 62 are in the table below, with the count by meeting and the court breakdown at its head and the sources at its foot.

The five September 28, 2026 resolutions, Nos. 128 through 132, are calendar items 9 through 13, and none carries an amount. A reader who wants to know what the county agreed to pay in the latest batch has the names of the cases and nothing else.

What the record hides

Sixty of 62 rows have no amount, and every 2026 row is blank. That is the finding. In my judgment it is the only finding that matters to a claimant: a woman with a notice of claim against Nassau County cannot learn from the county’s own publications what comparable claims settled for. That information sits with the County Attorney and with the lawyers who negotiated each one. The record also omits every vote, and it states a claim type in one resolution of 62.

New York City does this differently. The New York City Comptroller, who settles claims in favor of or against the City under the City Charter, publishes an annual claims report; the report for Fiscal Year 2023, dated April 16, 2024, states that 13,227 claims and lawsuits against the City were resolved for $1.45 billion and that the median personal injury settlement was $15,000. The Nassau County pages this study read carry nothing like it.

The Freedom of Information Law is the route to the missing figures. Public Officers Law § 87(2) directs each agency to “make available for public inspection and copying all records” unless one of its listed exceptions applies, and a denial “shall be valid only when there is a particularized and specific justification for such denial.” Under § 89(3)(a) the county has five business days to produce, deny in writing, or acknowledge with an approximate date; whether it will assert an exception is for the county to say.

A records request under the Freedom of Information Law was filed on September 28, 2026 with the Records Access Officers of the Nassau County Legislature and the Office of the County Attorney, for the text of each 2025 and 2026 settlement resolution with any memorandum stating the amount, the record of the vote on each, and any ledger of settlements and judgments paid in those years. Part two publishes what comes back. In the meantime, the absence of a number is no reason to delay her own filings.

What this means for a claim against the county

The clocks on a claim against Nassau County run from the day of the injury, and nothing the county publishes moves them. County Law § 52(1) requires every tort claim against a county to be served under General Municipal Law § 50-e and every action to be commenced under § 50-i, and § 50-h applies to counties by its own terms; for a fall on a county road, § 50-e(4) also preserves any prior-notice requirement the law imposes for a defective street or highway. The clock below sets out each deadline in the statute’s own words and adds the two that belong to the county, its answer to a records request and its vote.

In my experience the county’s number moves on things the calendar never shows: the § 50-h transcript, the notice of claim and the forum. It is incumbent upon the claimant under § 50-e(2) to state the time, the place and the manner of the fall, and a notice that misstates either is the county’s first defense. The forum is Supreme Court in Nassau County or federal court in the Eastern District. That is experience. Nothing in the 62 rows measures it.

If you stand where the Elmont claimant stands, the advice is short. Check that your notice states the date, the place and the way you fell with enough particularity that the county cannot say it was misled. When the demand for the examination arrives, prepare for it as testimony; the transcript can be read at trial. Calendar the one-year-and-ninety-day date from the day you fell; a settlement conversation does not move it. Then watch the committee agendas and the calendars; when your case settles, that is where it will appear, without the amount. Every personal injury claim this office handles against a public entity runs on these clocks.

Bring these to the first call:

• the notice of claim as served, with proof of service;
• the county’s demand for examination and the transcript, if the examination was held;
• dated photographs of the place where you fell;
• the date of the fall and the name of the road, so the owner can be confirmed in writing.

Limitations

The sample is the Full Legislature calendars: a claim settled without a resolution, withdrawn, paid on a judgment or still pending is outside it, and so is one item the September 14, 2026 committee agendas referred but the September 28 calendar did not list. Adoption is unverified for every row. The court is inferred from an index number’s format and is never printed. Captions are quoted as printed, and nothing is added about the people in them.

The amount is verified for one payment in 62, so nothing in the table supports a total, an average or a median for what Nassau County pays, and none is offered. The 62 resolutions are not representative of all claims against the county, and nothing in them predicts what any claim, including the Elmont claimant’s, is worth. Use the table as an index of what the county calendared and for nothing else.

How this study updates

The calendars are read on a schedule, and the table will be republished each quarter with the amounts as the county produces them. A case settling now will appear in the next release whether or not the county prints the number.

Sources

• Nassau County Legislature, Full Legislature calendars, 2025: January 27, February 24, March 24, April 23, May 19, June 23, July 28, September 29, November 24, December 17
• Nassau County Legislature, Full Legislature calendars, 2026: January 26, March 23, April 27, June 1, June 29, July 27, September 28
• Proposed resolutions posted on the February 24, 2025 agenda page: Resolution 21-25, Hernandez v. County of Nassau; Resolution 22-25, County of Nassau v. Commercial Concrete Corp.
• Nassau County AgendaCenter (the meeting index searched)
• Nassau County Administrative Code, compilation as of January 1, 2026, § 11-3.0
• County Government Law of Nassau County (the County Charter), compilation of January 1, 2026, §§ 102, 1102
• General Municipal Law § 50-e, § 50-h, § 50-i
• County Law § 52, § 501
• Public Officers Law § 87, § 89
• New York City Comptroller, Annual Claims Report, Fiscal Year 2023 (April 16, 2024)