Editorial: Arrow HQ exit a blow to LI

It wasn't exactly an arrow to the economic heart of the region, but the announcement that Arrow Electronics is moving its corporate headquarters from Melville to Colorado does warrant sober reflection on how the regional economy is doing. There are reasons for concern, but if we go down the woe-is-us road over this bit of news, we risk making that sense of impending doom a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The move hurts, because Arrow is a technology firm that grew into the region's largest publicly traded company, and technology is the key to the Island's economy. It's not going to remove any Arrow jobs from Long Island right now, but the company's future growth is clearly in the Rockies. That's where the chief executive lives -- a major factor in the relocation decision.

Still, it's a further erosion of publicly traded companies based on Long Island. These days, that list, a feature in Newsday's business section, is more than 40 percent smaller than it was a decade ago. And Arrow will soon be off it. That trend is moving in the wrong direction.

It's difficult to lure companies to the Island from other states, given our high property taxes, steep power bills and other high costs of doing business. So the name of the economic development game is retention: keeping the companies we already have, growing new ones, and finding ways to keep those fledgling firms from fleeing the nest.

We have powerful engines of science and innovation, which will spawn high-tech start-up firms. But we have to do better at nurturing them into major firms that will create jobs -- here. That's the goal of the Accelerate Long Island initiative, which links Stony Brook University, Hofstra University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research at the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, CA Technologies and the Long Island Association, which is setting up Accelerate as a separate corporate entity and will house its staff.

We also have town and county industrial development agencies and the state agency, Empire State Development. This year alone, ESD has helped to retain or create 5,000 jobs on Long Island. In 1995, the agency gave Arrow a $400,000 grant to retain 450 jobs here and create 50 more. The company lived up to that bargain. But this time, Arrow approached neither ESD nor Suffolk County.

Speaking of Suffolk, Canon USA is erecting a headquarters building in Melville. At the state level, there's also good news: Last month, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that five big firms -- IBM, Intel, Samsung, Global Foundries and TSMC -- are investing more than $4 billion to build advanced computer chips upstate.

Still, the Arrow story reminds us to whittle away at taxes and energy costs, and to be aggressive in selling our strong points. People still love living here, for the schools, the beaches, the wineries, the East End's open space. And companies love our intelligent workforce. In fact, some firms that moved south are now looking to come back, because our workers are superior. But we have to keep pushing to align employee training with the needs of industry.

If we do all that, the loss of Arrow's headquarters will soon fade into insignificance. But we have to remain vigilant. hN