To view a PDF of the Long Island Association's 2026 Policy Priorities, click here.
Introduction
This year, we will commemorate the 250th anniversary of our great nation. The Long Island Association (LIA) is also celebrating 100 years of providing regional leadership for economic expansion. Here at the LIA, we say that Long Island’s Future is our Business – and with the support of our members and Board of Directors, it will be for the next 100 years and beyond.
Since 1926, our population has increased 900% and we have gone from a bedroom community of New York City to an internationally recognized economic powerhouse. Our mission as a nascent organization was to attract companies from New York City to locate on Long Island and encourage new infrastructure and roadways to spur population growth. While Long Island has changed significantly, the LIA continues to advocate for a positive business climate and infrastructure that can accommodate economic growth as a non-profit and non-partisan partnership of business leaders.
But that has become increasingly challenging. Recently, the political buzzword has been “affordability” – which is truly the existential issue facing Long Island businesses and residents. While it has entered the common vernacular across the country and state – it is something the LIA has been ringing the alarm bell over for decades. While often viewed as an affluent suburb of New York City, the cost-of-living challenges are more acute on Long Island than in other parts of the state and country due to high taxes and a labyrinth of burdensome regulations. Small business owners and large employers alike are strangled by health care costs, insurance, operational mandates, and the list goes on.
In 2026, our elected officials can make choices that stem the tide of people and companies leaving for so-called greener pastures and keep them right here in New York and on Long Island. Working in partnership with the common goal of stabilizing and growing our economy, we can reverse the path of rising costs and overregulation.
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And it all starts with one simple thing – power. Not power of one person or a group of people, but literal power – keeping the lights on and ensuring the capacity to accommodate economic growth. A reliable, resilient, and affordable energy grid is the foundation for a prosperous economy. This includes hardening our transmission and distribution system to safeguard us from outages, leveraging all sources available to us to foster a robust energy portfolio, and having the most up-to-date technologies to store the energy. We can’t build new housing, support business expansion and job creation in industries including artificial intelligence and biotechnology or ensure the vibrancy of our downtowns without reliable, abundant, and cost-effective power.
Affordability continues with cultivating a landscape where businesses can thrive – and this means not raising taxes on residents or businesses, reducing regulations instead of piling on new ones, and cutting red tape so economic growth such as new housing can be enacted more efficiently. It also means looking at our economic challenges and funding streams holistically – for example, large infrastructure projects could build in funding to address housing, child care, and workforce issues in a community to increase the impact of the project and overall economic competitiveness of the area. If Long Island is to remain affordable and livable for the next generation, we must evolve from a system optimized to prevent action into one designed to deliver outcomes—housing people can afford, energy systems that are reliable, and infrastructure that matches our aspirations.
Long Island is a special place to live with an unmatched quality of life – and this is because of our highly ranked K-12 schools, higher education institutions, and healthcare facilities; our pristine environmental beauty between two coasts; our vibrant local communities and the small businesses that drive them; our world-famous East End with its agriculture, aquaculture, and tourism attractions; and our ever-expanding industry sectors including advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, clean energy, and artificial intelligence, which is supported by our highly expert professional services firms.
The 2026 LIA Policy Priorities provides a roadmap for officials on the federal, state, and local levels of government to ensure that people seeking the quintessential American dream like they did 100 years ago can continue to benefit from Long Island’s unique assets.
