Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Announces $46.5 Million from Long Island Investment Fund to Support Three Transformative Regional Projects

Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul announced the $350 million Long Island Investment Fund awarded its next three grants totaling $46.5 million: $30 million for Farmingdale State College to build a Center for Computer Science and Information Technology, $10 million for Long Island University to build a College of Science Applied Research and Innovation facility, and $6.5 million for Stony Brook University to construct a new Quantum Internet Test Bed. The Governor also announced that Farmingdale State College's new Center for Computer Science and Information Technology will be fully funded by the State and will use $45 million from the State University of New York Construction Fund for the project in addition to the $30 million from the LIIF. With these projects, the Long Island Investment Fund has invested $56.5 million, leveraging another $122 million in public and private dollars, to help drive economic growth on Long Island, and will create hundreds of new jobs on Long Island and support the education and training of thousands. Today's announcement further demonstrates Governor Hochul's commitment to the region's future by building the foundational infrastructure needed to support Long Island's talented workforce and continue its status as a hub of technology and innovation.

VIDEO of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.

AUDIO of the event is available here.

PHOTOS of the event will be available on the Governor's Flickr page.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks are available below:

Thank you. Well, good afternoon everyone. Great to be back on Long Island. First question on everyone's mind is, how's the US soccer team doing? Someone must be watching, right? Someone must be watching. So, we're very excited about this.

I want to thank Kim Cline for her extraordinary leadership here. This is one of our crown jewels. We're very proud of the work that you do here every single day. And again, it's all about attracting, yes the students, but the faculty, the researchers, and the others who take us to the next levels. So, I want to thank you for welcoming us here today.

We are very, very fortunate to have leadership from my administration. Hope Knight has traveled this state and everywhere she goes, she is so in tune with the needs of the local communities, which is important to me, and making sure that we have economic development investments that are really making a difference. Let's give another round of applause to Hope Knight.

And I would say I knew what I was doing when I asked Kevin Law to be the Chair of the Empire State Development because you know, Kevin, there's another whole state out there outside of Long Island too, okay? He has been a great champion for the entire state, but also we know where his heart is and that's okay. I understand. I understand the passion for this wonderful place. So, Kevin, thank you for all you are doing.

We have also great leaders in county government. I spent 14 years in local government, a number of years in county government. So, I do want to thank, particularly, an individual I worked with for many, many years, Steve Bellone, our Suffolk County Executive. Thank you, Steve. We do a lot of announcements together. There's a lot of announcements. And also Bruce Blakeman, I look forward to continuing to work with you, driving investments and opportunities right here in Nassau County.

We have a whole delegation - we'll be hearing from Anna Kaplan, and I want to thank her once again for always pushing and pushing and pushing, all that you do to just lift up our communities here on Long Island. Well, and again, our entire delegation. I mean, all the leaders we have here in the Assembly and the Senate, you really are a powerful voice, and I want that to continue. Your voices will be listened to, and I'm grateful for the friendships, working with many of you and the newer members I'll get to know as well.

We also have an interesting guest, Tweed Roosevelt is here, the great-grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. We met once before. We met before right here. And if there's one passage that I quote more than any, starting with last August 24th, 2021, when I first extended to be Governor, that was the "Man in the Arena" speech from Theodore Roosevelt. Now, I took a little license here. I actually have it large scale, blown up, framed in my office, except I change it to, "Woman in the Arena." So, I hope that's okay. But I look forward to our tour of the Roosevelt House, and I let you know that I'm honored to live in the same residence that Theodore Roosevelt once occupied and that inspiration is ever-present. How you meet challenges with dignity, but also an impatience, an aggressiveness that you say, "We have to work on these issues together." So, that's where I approach this as well.

I also - Valley Stream Central High School gets some recognition as a National Blue Ribbon School. I want to acknowledge them by the Department of Education. County Executive put a spotlight on them today. I couldn't attend the event, but I want to thank you for that as well. Also, we love our sports here, so we're following very closely what's happening with the game here. But I understand we had a nice victory with the hockey team, is that correct? Our Long Island University hockey team. Congratulations. Congratulations. Well, and I'm a sports fan. Okay. You don't want to - we already had some football conversations, so we're just going to kind of leave the Jets and the Bills and everybody alone right now. Okay. But we're very proud of what's going on here.

So, here we are. I have been here so many times to really discuss my love for this region. It's a microcosm of New York. You know, Long Island is a smaller version of New York. It has rural areas, farmland, wineries, farmers' markets. It also has incredibly vibrant downtowns that have that charm, that history just oozing a story, whether it's from Montauk or closer to far western regions of Nassau. The beaches, the County Executives were fighting over who has the better beaches. Okay, I will have to be the judge. But it has a quality of life, which is exceptional. And you draw people here and you allow people to stay here because of one thing: Are you giving them jobs, opportunities, a chance for them to build the life that they grew up in? And this is a challenge for us. It's a challenge for the state, but it's also a challenge here on Long Island when you think about are we meeting the needs of our communities? Keeping them safe? Number one, you have to have safety. Are we giving them the downtowns that are vibrant? Are we investing in our infrastructure? Yes. I was just at Grand Central Madison a few hours ago this morning. Those of you who are going to ride in on East Side Access are going to be blown away. Those are my words, and believe me, when you have a chance to ride this at the end of next month, it's going to be an experience that is life-changing in terms of how uplifting the experience will be. And I'm really proud that we're finally getting this done after people talk about it in the 1950s.

So, transportation, downtowns, great quality of life. We need places for people to live too. And I'm going to just telegraph right now that this is going to be an important part of what we're going to be talking about, not just at our State of the State, but for the next four years. Because what is so exciting is that we have opportunities. We have jobs. We have world-class educational and research institutions that are the envy of every other state. And how we lift them up and bring the people here and create the jobs is about New York State investments. You can tell our priorities by where we're putting our money.

And therefore today, I'm going to be announcing a lot of money coming to this area, so let's talk about that. And we have made investments. I mean, I hope you didn't run into too many potholes as you were coming here today because those of you know I've been traveling all over and I said, let's invest money to - this is the legislature. I want to thank all of you for standing up and saying, "We have a problem." You know, you want to live in a nice community, if you're going over potholes every single day and spending $500 to get your tire fixed, I mean, that affects the quality of life. So, we just finished projects and I was very pushy about this starting last April. We just invested $157 million to fix the potholes on Long Island.

So, it's about - you mention education, we're talking about higher education, we'll get to that. But also K-12 preschool programs. We just invested $457 million in education here on Long Island. That's an increase - and that's not the total - that's an increase of $457 million, 12 percent more than the previous year. And again, legislators were champions of this as well.

We also made sure that we have investments in our homes, our homeownership - average of $1,300 for over almost half a million Long Island homeowners. The $500 million investment in offshore wind. I talk about this all the time. This is a game-changer. We have been so excited about these investments. If you don't make these investments, you can't expect an industry to emerge out of nothing. You have to say, this is an area we're going to focus money on, the job training. I see Matty Aracich here, I see John Durso here - the people who are building up these incredible infrastructure projects.

It's also the supply chain. I mean, I've said this before, but I'm so excited about the fact that we'll be making component parts for offshore wind turbines off the shores of Long Island, we're making them up into the Port of Albany, shipping them down the Hudson River. This is how we start giving people jobs and opportunities that were not even dreamed about just a few years ago.

So, we're going to have a national offshore wind training center at Farmingdale and Stony Brook. So, this is another investment. And I also want to thank the voters of New York and a lot of them on Long Island for believing in the future and our moral responsibility to leave this planet better than we found it by voting for the historically high Environmental Bond Act - over $4.2 billion. Coastline resiliency, rebuilding our wetlands, water quality. This is everything on Long Island.

People aren't talking about the Islanders and potholes, they are talking about water quality. I know this, and so we're focusing on this as well. So, we're excited about this, and as I mentioned, we want to make sure that that commute back and forth to the City, if that's where people work, is going to be seamless, moving students and commuters. The Third Track, how extraordinary was this, talked about for years, finally accomplished, and I mentioned Grand Central Madison. So, we talk about all these amenities. I want to make sure that when our days are gone, that people look back and say, the people of 2022 built a phenomenal ecosystem that rivals all, exceeds and surpasses all when it comes to the life sciences, when it comes to attracting the smartest people here.

So, we're not going to have a research triangle. Everyone talked my whole life, everybody from Buffalo was going to their nice jobs out of state. They're going down to the research triangle. No offense, Kim. I know you're from there, but okay. Let's look at the shape of a triangle. Okay. It seems very defined. Okay. You don't go outside this triangle. We have a research corridor. A corridor can go on forever. There's no end in sight. So, this corridor expands from one eye, from Brookhaven connecting all of our incredible institutions not in a competitive way, but in a way that creates a synergy that is going to make us surpass all expectations. We're going to attract talent from around the world. They're going to say, "This is the place to be." Bring your talents, create thousands of jobs. I lived in an area from Buffalo. When I left there to go to law school, the unemployment rate was 17 percent. None of my siblings could find jobs. They all left the state. It's tragic. It really is. And that was a generation and a half loss.

Unemployment on Long Island was 2.2 percent. I had to take a double-take at that. I said, "I didn't know that was possible." So what does that mean? We have to bring more people here, house them, because employers want to create, are creating jobs while we speak. So, this is a great opportunity, but also the technology, the opportunities we have here, there's momentum that we have to continue investing in. Don't assume that investments made five or 10 years ago are going to suffice. Okay? You have to keep bringing money and investing in them.

And again, I want to just thank the leadership of the delegation, Senator Kaplan and Kevin Thomas helped with this. John Brooks. Jim Gaughran, and so many others who really stepped up at a time last year and said, "We need to put a special spotlight on Long Island because their needs are unique. There's nothing like what Long Island needs." And if we put the money there and create a whole pot of money, $350 million in last year's budget, we can do transformative projects. So again, thank you for coming with us to do this. Last September I announced the first pot of money out of our Long Island Investment Fund. It was the Feinstein Institute of Medical Research, 10 million for them to innovate to work on their lab, creating jobs and attracting talent. And we said, "This is just the tip of the iceberg." I said that back in September.

Today, I'm really proud to announce three more awards, $46.5 million that'll create hundreds and hundreds of jobs, and all these projects, with this, will have invested over $56 million just since September. So, we're just getting warmed up. We have a lot more to allocate, but these investments will also be a catalyst for private investments, over $122 million in private investments, hundreds of jobs in educating and training thousands of New Yorkers. Let me just give you a little more specific on how we're going to do that: We're going to continue positioning Long Island as a national leader in life sciences and biotechnology. You can say it all you want, but you have to back it up. You have to show that the investments are there, the institutions are ready, the training's going on, the talent is coming, the people have the jobs. Then you can say, we truly are a national leader in this space. We also want to continue boosting our research institutions that put Long Island on the map, that way people know, this is where the innovation is happening. It's incredible to realize when I find some institute, I remember hearing what the work that they're doing all over if you actually put together all the people that are just coming up with patents and ideas that are just being commercialized, they're, incredible, they're just extraordinary. And it's all happening in one concentrated place in the State of New York. That's what's so amazing about this.

We are also connecting New Yorkers with the skills for the future. So, Long Island University, the College of Science Applied Research and Innovation facility, where we're going to continue investing in biotech life sciences. And we're going to have our first award go to have a 40,000 square foot College of Science Applied Research and Innovation on the Brookville campus. That's going to be amazing. It's going to be investing in new majors in Artificial Intelligence, Digital Engineering, Drug and Discovery Production, and $10 million will help this $40 million project, going to create at least 70-something jobs, so let's make this happen. Let's make this happen right here.

All right. We can't leave Stony Brook outside. In Brookhaven National Lab, the Long Island Quantum Internet Center, someone asked me - they never heard of quantum internet. I said, "What do you mean you don't know what quantum internet is? Do I have to explain this to you? Go look it up on the internet! So, we've already come so far with our internet technology, but also this is an award that's going to go to Stony Brook and Brookhaven, and they're going to be leading the way in quantum internet technology research. And actually, the question is, what is this? It is the Internet of tomorrow. I mean, that's how big this is. This is how big and audacious this is. And it's going to be faster than the speed of light and internet technology, and Long Island is no stranger to this. And we are also going to be continuing to provide this powerful connection between here and across the country. So, through this award, we're going to be testing quantum internet in five tested locations across Long Island. Not sure where they're going to be, somebody will tell us soon, I'm sure. But that means Long Island will lead in new forms of financial trading, personal data handling, and power grid security. And it'll be the first region in the US with never-seen-before computing capabilities. So this is a very, very big deal, not only leading in innovation, but again, if you make these investments, people will follow because they want to be part of innovating the future. This is how we attract the towns. So we have to get the word out. In total that that is $6.5 million for a project of $13 million.

And lastly, Farmingdale State College, a building for applied sciences. We want to continue making investments in skills training in the jobs of the future. And the third award goes to a 40,000-square-foot center for Computer Science and Information Technology. How does that look? We'll have new classrooms, students will have market-ready experiences in different fields, of livestream capacity, innovation labs, space for the students to have engagement, and it'll also boost our workforce training, creating space for Long Islanders to create and learn for the IT jobs of the future. So, another exciting project. It's a $75 million project. $30 million will come from our Long Island investment grant, as well as $45 million from our SUNY Construction Grant. So, this will also create the construction jobs, which we build, you know how important that is. But also, the longer term faculty, and again, just one more way to give options to the smartest people who probably started on Long Island, but in case they live somewhere else, they're going to want to come here and be part of this whole ecosystem. So, Long Island is where the future's really being imagined. I mean, this is so exciting to me. We have not just the smartest people, but the greatest facilities, and the infrastructure that'll continue to lead the nation. Not just lead our state, but lead the nation. So I'm really proud. This is a great day for Long Island and I just want to say congratulations to, again, our legislators for bringing the ideas to us, to the team that decided on these projects.

And again, we have many more projects. So, we'll see you same time, same place, another part of Long Island, I guarantee you. But, you know, just as your Governor, I could not be prouder to work with people that are so excited, who see possibilities where others don't. That's what sets us apart as New Yorkers. That's what New York exceptionalism is all about. It defines us as a people and it's something that we can never lose sight of, why we are so unique here in the State of New York. And when you think about unique New York, Long Island has its own special place in making history and we're living it right now. So, congratulations to everyone involved. And with this, I'd like to bring up Senator Anna Kaplan and thank her for her leadership on these issues as well.