Morrelly Security Center marks progress in Bethpage

Tom Ridge was handed two bottles of Cutchogue-based Palmer Vineyard wine - one red and one white - as part of his official welcome Friday morning to the new Morrelly Homeland Security Center in Bethpage.

Ridge, the former U.S. Homeland Security secretary, and dozens of Long Island business, political and civic officials were on hand to announce that the 90,000-square-foot center - which opened last spring on the grounds of the Northrop Grumman Corp. complex - is operating and is near capacity. It now houses 16 companies, with room for two more.

Morrelly officials called it a "commissioning," just as a Navy ship would be commissioned to go to sea. (C. Kenneth Morrelly, the center's late founder, was a Navy buff.)

It was all smiles and good wishes as police officers, firefighters and first responders joined other officials in a large auditorium, after Ridge, who is also a former Pennsylvania governor, was handed wine bottles by George Hochbrueckner of Coram, a former congressman. But the cheer masked, for the moment at least, the center's serious mission: both to provide space and assistance to companies working on homeland security equipment, and to house Nassau County's Office of Emergency Services, which acts as a first responder.

Ridge did not sugarcoat the homeland security threat. Living under it, he said, "is the new norm," just as living under the possibility of a nuclear exchange with the former Soviet Union was during the Cold War.

"The fact of the matter is we're going to be at this for a long time, folks," Ridge said, referring to the war on terrorism.

Ridge, appointed in 2003 as the nation's first homeland security secretary, resigned in 2005 and is now chief executive of Ridge Global, a Washington, D.C.,-based security consultancy.

He also paid tribute to Catherine Morrelly. Her husband, for years a driver behind the center, died in October 2009, five months before the facility opened.

State Senate Minority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Rockville Centre), who helped secure $25 million in state funding for the center, called Morrelly "a visionary." A conference room at the center has been named after Skelos.