Teamwork can help LI business
Long Island Association president Kevin Law Credit: John Dunn
Fragmentation is the Long Island way: too many governments, too little regional thinking. The same is true of our economic development: too many players, too often going it alone, instead of collaborating. Last week, it cropped up again.
Since the 2009 scare over OSI Pharmaceuticals moving off the Island, this page has called for a unified economic- development voice for the region, to do better at tracking firms threatening to leave and to recruit new ones. Last year, when Kevin Law became chief executive of the Long Island Association, we urged him to use his new position to encourage greater teamwork in this area.
Law has been trying. Last week, he put together a meeting for the industrial development agencies serving the towns and counties. Not a bad start. Unfortunately, the IDAs are unlikely to merge or dissolve, but they should be communicating more.
One proposal the meeting produced: Any business that grows out of Accelerate Long Island, an effort to commercialize scientific research, should get top priority for tax breaks and other IDA benefits.
Those who came thought it was a useful meeting. But the large Hempstead IDA didn't show. Its executive director huffed that "we can handle things on our own."
That's exactly the kind of go-it-alone thinking that fragmentation encourages and that we can't afford. Though Hempstead has already declined a May meeting too, Law should keep pushing for IDA collaboration.
