Council aims to stop Long Island from 'dying'

The inclusive air is similar, but the goal is more refined: ideas, analysis, results. “This is not a tea party,” said Robert Fonte, co-chairman of the recently formed Long Island Business Council—a group of eclectic workers to fit the council’s grassroots calling.
   
The council sprouted last fall from the concern of two businessmen, Fonte and founder Richard Bivone, over the state of Long Island small business. However nascent and still congealing—around 50 attended its only meeting at a Molloy College annex in Farmingdale—the council has marked four major issues to tackle: tax relief, government services consolidation, energy and downtown revitalization.
   
Its approach to these issues distinguishes it from the nearly 100 chambers of commerce and larger business-benevolent organizations, like the Long Island Association and the Nassau Council of Chambers of Commerce, on the island: Solutions will be found among all people, not just business people.
    
“We realized that in order to solve the problems of Long Island, we need Long Island to participate,” said Fonte, who lives in Cold Spring Harbor and runs a management company in Manhattan.
   
To that end Bivone, who lives and works in East Meadow, extended hundreds of invitations to firefighters, police officers and school district employees, lawyers and senators. “Right now we believe that we’re flat-lined and that Long Island is dying,” he said recently at his office. “Unless we all sit at a table to fix it, Long Island will die.”