Bellone Visits Three Village Chamber, Talks Suffolk's Future

Addressing a crowd of business owners and community leaders at the monthly meeting of the Three Village Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday, Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone said Suffolk County is working towards structural balance and is trying to once again become the place where young, educated people want to live.

It will still be two to three years before Suffolk will attain that structural balance, Bellone said, but it's something he said he and his cabinet have been working towards since he was elected in November of 2011. Achieving structural balance and smart planning will stop the exodus of the young, educated workforce away from Long Island, which he said is a critical need for the county.

"Because we do have so much, we have always assumed that young people and people in general as well as businesses will always want to be here. We now know that is not the case," Bellone said. "Despite everything else, we have to do things affirmatively, we have to take action affirmatively, to make sure our community is a place people want to be, particularly young people."

Among the steps he pinpointed was developing quality, affordable rental housing.   

"We have not built a housing stock that is appropriate to attract the young creative class to this region, plain and simple," Bellone said. "If there is no place for them to live, if their only choice is in a basement apartment somewhere or living with their parents, which many of us do and have done, you’re going to lose a lot of those young people and you are certainly not going to attract others from around the country."

Another needed step, he said, is to develop a meaningful transportation infrastructure, one in which people can actually get around the island without relying on cars. One plan in the works would focus on north-south transit routes.

"We have been taught we are genetically predisposed to the automobile," he said. "We will always be dependent on the car. But all of you who have driven on the LIE understand that we are not going to create growth in this region by adding more cars to the roadway."

Yet another need, Bellone said, is the need to fix the dysfunction that he said exists in the county legislature. He described the county government as "incapable currently of focusing on big things" and said it needs to change the culture of personality politics in order to become more effective.

"This beautiful place that we have here can be an economic powerhouse," he said.

Following Bellone's talk, one local business owner told the county executive that he feels he correctly has his pulse on the reality of things in Suffolk.

"I’m that demographic you’re talking about," Eliel Pimentel, a local financial planner, said to Bellone. "I’m 32. My wife and I are well educated. Our peers and our friends aren't here. They’re everywhere else."

Dr. Eoin Gregory, a local chiropractor who is 36 years old, said that in addition to a better transportation system with more ways off the island, the county needs to expand highly-skilled tech jobs and higher-paying non-executive positions for young people.

"One of the biggest concerns I have as a young business owner is the loss of young people. I see Stony Brook graduate students who don't live here because they either can't afford to live here or they don't have the life here and end up living in the city," Gregory said.

Carmine Inserra, 40, another local business owner, agreed and said "it's just an expensive place." "I went to Stony Brook University, and there are almost none of my friends around. They're all living elsewhere. They all moved upstate or moved down south."