Builder stresses importance of sewers on Island

'The future of Long Island is sewers," said Jack Kulka, a founding member of the Hauppauge Industrial Association-Long Island, with characteristic certainty and bluntness.

Kulka, owner of Kulka Construction Corp. of Hauppauge, should know. He worked for a contractor at the Hauppauge Industrial Park when most of it was just sandhills in the mid-1960s.

The park, the second-largest industrial facility in the country, with 1,300 businesses, is about to be upgraded with two new sewer plants and hookups to the businesses that still use septic tanks - which is about half of them.

Suffolk Department of Public Works chief engineer Ben Wright said he expects to issue requests for proposals for the project in the next few weeks.

Kulka will be talking Wednesday about the sewer project at the Sheraton Long Island Hotel in Hauppauge at an HIA-LI panel discussion. It is open to anyone wanting to know how to hook up to the system, or who has other questions.

"From an environmental standpoint, from a business density standpoint," Kulka said, "unless you have sewers, not only in the industrial parks, but in the downtowns as well, you're not going to have huge expansions."