Content area
Full text
THIRTEEN YEARS AGO, in an auditorium at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Long Island leaders met in an ambitious effort to save Long Island from itself.
The upshot was a document called the Stony Brook Manifesto, and it called for everyone from Garden City to Riverhead to acknowledge what the Island had become: a region with its own identity and needs, instead of a collection of communities that supported Manhattan. The leaders sought to promote the interests of Long Island instead of just Amityville, Brookhaven or Nassau.
The effort failed for reasons still being debated. But one factor was that Long Islanders were unwilling to make compromises. As a result, the same problems that plagued Long Island in 1978 - high taxes, crowded roads, the lack of affordable housing - continue to irritate in 1991.
Now business and civic leaders will try again. Organizers of the latest initiative, beginning Wednesday with a conference called the Long Island Summit, hope this time will be different.
The conference, sponsored by the Long Island Association, will include hundreds of groups and corporations representing everyone from union members to big business, from minorities to the elderly.
Participants acknowledge the effort could easily fail, that Long Islanders will remain unwilling to give up community control of schools in exchange for lower taxes, or that they will continue to block affordable housing even if it means the ongoing flight of young families.
But the recession gives organizers cause for hope. With local job totals shrinking for the first time in memory, organizers say Long Islanders will finally agree on solutions. With any luck, they say, developers and environmentalists will talk without coming to blows, and Nassau and Suffolk leaders will lay aside their rivalries.
"The people who used to say, `It's not going to get me,' are beginning to hurt," said Fenimore Fisher, chairman of the Long Island Forum for Technology. "When you get hurt economically, you change your way of thinking."
Others are less enthusiastic about the summit. "It's an exercise in futility," said George Proios, a state water official who has seen similar lofty efforts come to nothing.
Whether he's right depends partly on what happens Wednesday at the Crest Hollow Country Club in...