By TOM MARINER //
One of Long Island’s most powerful business organizations was originally sparked by a power outage.
The HIA-LI launched after a 1978 blackout, which left many of Long Island industrial residents in the dark and showed a glaring need for uniform representation of those businesses. It was built originally to boost what was then called Hauppauge Industrial Park – but has since grown into an advocate for all Long Island business, with everything from a networking fete on Fire Island’s Tobay Beach to an Island-wide artificial intelligence conference in Brookville on the board.
A main driver for this innovative growth has been HIA-LI’s leaders, who have energetically presided over this decades-long expansion. But this evolving influence really dates back six decades, to the start of the 1,400-acre industrial park now known as Long Island Innovation Park at Hauppauge. (For the record, the nation’s second-largest industrial park, trailing only Silicon Valley.)
The park’s co-founder, the late, great developer Jack Kulka, recognized a unique opportunity at what was then the terminus of the Long Island Expressway, and he was right: The park has grown into an economic powerhouse, with some 1,400 organizations – and more than 55,000 employees – operating there daily.
Tom Mariner: Hauppaugian historian.
But company counts and staff sizes don’t tell the full story of this incredible place, or the organization that represents it.
The park’s streets are laid to accommodate heavy trucks, but lined with shade trees and manicured lawns – a continuation of Kulka’s original goal to integrate the business hub with surrounding communities, instead of building a concrete fortress that screamed “industrial!”
Those aims were defined by simple rules: a 200-foot buffer between surrounding schools and housing, no more than 25 percent of each park plot occupied by structures, fully landscaped building fronts with loading platforms in the rear.
When the Hauppauge Industrial Association (the HIA-LI’s original name) launched in 1978, it recognized the importance of partnering with local governments and regional assets like Stony Brook University on essential elements like sewers and technology.
In December 2004, Terri Alessi-Miceli was selected as the association’s president and CEO, following nearly 19 years with Dale Carnegie Training, first in sales and then as managing director of Long Island operations.
Her ambitious vision has widened the organization’s purview. Alessi-Miceli is actively involved with local government and developers – she is a board member of regional tourism group Discover Long Island and a former board member of the Long Island Regional Planning Council and the New York League of Conservation Voters, for instance.
All that experience and all those connections culminated in a 2019 Suffolk County Industrial Development Agency study revealing Long Island Innovation Park’s critical importance to the Long Island economy. Among the study’s takeaways: 58 percent of the park’s jobs were in “tradeable clusters,” involving goods and services sold and/or consumed outside of the region (that includes international sales made by the 46 members of Long Island Bio who call the park home).
Essentially, this speaks to companies bringing new money into the region, instead of simply churning it around locally.
Alessi-Miceli’s superior management skills have expanded the HIA-LI’s influence by energizing the organization’s staff, committees and Board of Directors. That Tobay Beach networking event was run by two of the association’s 12 committees (the HYPE Committee and the Business Acceleration Committee), each of which is designed to help those hundreds of members companies in specific ways.
Terri Alessi-Miceli: Fearless leader.
And then there’s the HIA-LI Trade Show Committee, which has labored for the past 36 years to organize a stellar event that annually attracts 4,000-plus attendees to a vast showcase of business booths and top-tier networking.
Leadership was further bolstered in 2011, when powerhouse attorney, organizational mover and former U.S. Marine Joe Campolo joined the Board of Directors (and later became its chairman). Campolo has colluded with Alessi-Miceli and a host of regional entities to enhance the HIA-LI brand, including renaming the industrial park and adding “LI” to the HIA’s name – a clear nod to the association’s value to all of Long Island.
In April, Alessi-Miceli and her team collaborated with President and CEO Matt Cohen and the rest of the Long Island Association on the impressive Long Island Artificial Intelligence Conference – a brilliant collection of speakers and panel discussions focused on the current and future importance of AI. It was a worthy topic to say the least, and a fine idea for the first-ever HIA-LI/LIA joint effort.
Where the HIA-LI goes from here remains to be seen, but there are certainly clues in Alessi-Miceli’s guiding statement: “Ideas are only worth celebrating,” she says, “if we turn them into action.”
Tom Mariner is the executive director of Bayport-based Long Island Bio.
