Mitchell Rechler, president of the Association for a Better Long Island (ABLI) and Managing Partner of Rechler Equity Partners and R Squared Real Estate Partners in Melville, believes the retreating economy will reshape the traditional adversarial relationship between developers and municipal government as local towns and counties begin to realize that the only help they are going to get to balance their budgets is from the real estate community.

Speaking before an industry symposium in Manhattan sponsored by Commercial Property News, Rechler said his company’s successful efforts in Riverhead Town on the east end of Long Island are representative of changing times and progressive, far sighted administrations.
 
“There are some government officials who don’t yet quite realize the extent of the financial crisis they are in because they have yet to see the revenue shortfall that is coming at them. When they do, and begin to tally up the tax increases they are going to have to place on the typical homeowner, they are going to understand just how difficult this political landscape has become. Those townships, like Riverhead, or Babylon Town which approved the recently opened Tanger Outlets Center on the site of an old obsolete defense plant, will have the fiscal cushion they need to weather this storm.”

The ABLI president spoke to a room filled with real estate colleagues who are trying to navigate a hostile real estate environment. Rechler says those who have long term financing in place for projects will find that savvy municipalities are willing to move those developments quickly. “This has been an enormous wake-up call for many who thought they could bully, block and beat the real estate community into submission. We are their fiscal lifeboat. If they don’t cooperate with responsible developers offering smart designs, then these municipalities will need to go back to the taxpayer and ask them for dollars they don’t have to give.”

Rechler observed that part of the long term problem has been the belief by some in local government that they can dictate market conditions and economic trends. “We have been literally told by government that our problems in Nassau County would be simply resolved if only we took our industrial space and made it commercial. That kind of thinking is so removed from the realities of the marketplace that you don’t know where to start to refute that logic.”

The ABLI president observed that Long Island needs to use the current economic crisis to take solemn stock of its challenges such as an aging infrastructure, indifference to “smart growth” designs, and the destabilizing threat of a dysfunctional tax assessment structure in Nassau County.  Rechler believes that a new generation of Long Islanders now coming of age will follow their siblings in an ongoing exodus that seeks out affordable, welcoming urban areas unless local municipal government leaders change course.

“It has required genuine political courage to offer land use leadership on Long Island. Today, the savaging of municipal budgets will compel every elected official to assume that mantle of leadership or they will preside over a decline that will be draconian in its transformation of our region,” warned Rechler. “We need to encourage, support and ally ourselves with those elected officials who insist on being forces for positive change and the protection of our region’s economic and environmental future.”

The Association for a Better Long Island represents some $20 billion in commercial, industrial, retail and residential real estate throughout Nassau and Suffolk Counties, and its mission is to propose, support and encourage land use policies that enhance our region’s quality of life. 

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