EDITORIAL: Kevin Law's task - make LIA matter

In this sour economy, Long Island's largest business organization, the Long Island Association, hasn't been nearly as bold and influential as the shortage of jobs demands. That has to change.

Our economy is going through a transition from a primary reliance on defense industries to a new emphasis on bioscience and high tech. That general direction seems clear, but we're getting there in fits and starts.

One of the fits was the announcement last year that OSI Pharmaceuticals would leave Long Island for Westchester County. OSI, a rising company with a new cancer drug, got its start at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the Broad Hollow Bioscience Park at Farmingdale State College. So that news came as a thunderclap. In recent months, a foreign firm bought OSI, and some of the 200 jobs will stay here. But that doesn't reduce the need for rethinking the way we do economic development here.

The Long Island Association's new leader, Kevin Law, must play a big role in that rethinking. It starts with a new sense of mission for the LIA: setting a clear job-building agenda and leading our Island back to prosperity.

Too many voices

There's a long list of actors who play an economic development role here: eight industrial development agencies, many business groups, and Empire State Development, a state agency. But we lack a strong, unified voice to plead the region's economic case in Albany and Washington, and to focus job-creation efforts. We're unlikely to eliminate duplication and create a single public-sector economic development agency, but that doesn't mean the private sector can't be more efficient and coordinated.

Given its roughly 5,000 members, the LIA can play that role. And it owes us one: It didn't exactly run around with its hair on fire alerting the rest of Long Island that the head of OSI, who had a significant role in the LIA, was contemplating greener pastures. But that was then. This is now.

The arrival of Law, who is leaving his role as head of the Long Island Power Authority, offers a chance for the association, already the largest business group, to reinvent itself as a much more powerful leader. Law's bridge-building talents should help.

The business community, like the public sector, is fragmented. Its many voices include the Association for a Better Long Island, Action Long Island, Long Island Advancement of Small Business and others. Some sprang up because their members felt the LIA wasn't serving their needs. Others represent specific trade interests or geographic areas. Building bridges to all of them will be crucial.

Law will also have to do some work internally. In this tough economy, more than ever, LIA member companies are tightly focused on day-to-day business. He has to remind them of the need for LIA to think long-term and attract new companies that will make the whole economy hum better. And he'll need to rally the unwieldy, nearly 60-member LIA board behind his evolving agenda.

The LIA to-do list

But what should that agenda be?

A key long-term goal should be to help increase collaboration and synergy among researchers at Stony Brook University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research. Equally important, the LIA must work to commercialize their discoveries and make sure they create jobs here, where they were born. In other words, remember OSI.

To grow new companies on the Island, we need more venture capital. That funding tends to fly over Long Island and end up on Route 128 in Boston or in California's Silicon Valley. The LIA should join - and lead - efforts to get more seed money for the Island.

It should focus on our strengths, such as pharmaceuticals and aviation, and encourage increased exports, with help from the Export-Import Bank of the United States, Empire State Development and other agencies, as part of President Barack Obama's goal of doubling exports.

The LIA should also work to lower the costs that weigh our companies down: energy and truck transportation, to name just two. Law's LIPA background should help on energy.

To meet the long-term goals, the LIA should have a small, targeted annual legislative agenda and work vigorously to enact it. In recent years the LIA has become increasingly known for hosting former U.S. presidents. While those events help raise funds and regional pride, the real test of the LIA is not whether an ex-president will accept a big speaking fee, but whether a governor, two county executives and legislators at every level will listen very closely to what the LIA has to say. It's time for Law to make it relevant again. hN