Good morning, everyone. My name is Joe Campolo and I proudly serve as the Managing Partner of Campolo, Middleton & McCormick, and just as proudly I serve as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the HIA-LI. I’m very happy to welcome you to this Solar Initiative Town Hall meeting this morning.
Many of you were in attendance last week at the Business Achievement Awards, where we all gathered to celebrate our love of Long Island and celebrate the innovation and economic growth happening right in our backyard.
Last year, we concluded a year-and-a-half long research project with graduate students from Stony Brook University to measure the impact of the Hauppauge Industrial Park on our region. The results of this Economic Impact Study were truly staggering, even to those of us at HIA-LI. I’d like to review just a few of those with you:
- The HIP is comprised of 11 square miles
- It’s the second largest industrial park in the nation, behind only Silicon Valley! (Pretty amazing when you think about all the notoriety Silicon Valley gets, and how little the HIP has gotten.)
- Contained within these 11 square miles are approximately 1,400 companies that employ about 55,000 people. In fact, one in 20 jobs on Long Island is dependent on the HIP.
- The total sales volume of these businesses is in excess of $13 billion.
- The total annual payroll to HIP employees is in excess of $2.8 billion.
- The total income tax paid on that payroll is $806 million.
- This leaves in excess of $2 billion of household income to spend locally.
- The HIP generates more that $64 million in local property taxes.
If you were with us at last week’s Business Achievement Awards, you heard about some of the actions we’re taking to invest in and grow the Park and its businesses now that we’re armed with this incredible information. I discussed the direct relationships we are building with our fantastic local educational institutions to create a workforce pipeline for local businesses, the creation of a small business task force to support a critical but often overlooked sector of the market, and the development of a solar initiative to help the businesses in the Park save on energy costs and become more competitive.
A successful solar initiative can differentiate the Hauppauge Industrial Park as the single largest rooftop distributed energy project in the country, dwarfing Silicon Valley. The solar initiative will make the park more attractive to potential and existing building owners, generating new revenue streams from existing assets. In addition, a successful solar initiative will create construction jobs and millions in revenue to enhance local spend.
A successful initiative should also compel investment in updating our aging Park electrical infrastructure by Albany and PSEG. We need a 21st century smart grid.
This morning you will learn more about this initiative and we encourage you to share your ideas so we can all work together to make the Long Island we love continue to grow and prosper.
