Connecticut Should Develop An HSC (Fast Ferry) From Bridgeport & Norwalk To Gantry Ferry Docks & Amazon HQ In Long Island City!

I'm not one to quibble with Jeff Bezos and his Amazon leadership team on the selection of Long Island City for one of their three headquarters. You'll always find someone to nibble ideas to death, and there is enough of that going on right now. But operating a business in LIC is different then where some of those 25,000 projected employees may want to raise a family.

Long Island, Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, The Bronx (it's always "The" Bronx, I know as I was born there), even Staten Island are nice places to visit, but not everyone may want to live there! Not a lot of elbow room. Yet, right up the East River and Long Island Sound, there are some truly great communities, with excellent schools, and room to breath. All in Connecticut. You can have big lawns, small lawns, or no lawns. Great colleges and universities, world class medicine, Incredible public and private schools. Fairfield County has a wealth of small towns or mid-sized cities to choose from.

Where I live, in Weston, CT, we have two-acre zoning for the most part, yet many of our homes are charming older homes, built prior to the 2-acre zoning regulations, on one acre or less. We have wonderful schools. All four, from preK-2 to our Blue Ribbon high school are on one road (disclosure; my wife is principal of the Weston Intermediate School and has taught in our community for 24 years) and our children leave well-prepared for college, and the workforce after.

There is something for everyone; our Lachat community farm with events year around, our Bisceglie town center park with its own pond for young parents, Devil's Den, a 1700 acre nature preserve (where I live, it's my backyard), there are multiple sports fields throughout the town, and hiking trails galore. We've got more community activities than you can shake a stick at and a short Memorial Day Parade (hey, with only 10,500 residents, you can't expect to have one that is seemingly endless, however it does end on our annual Memorial Day Fair). And we gather on the middle school lawn for July 4th fireworks. OK, I'll grant you it's not the same as New York's on the East and Hudson Rivers. And just maybe these are the reasons are neighbors run from Rock n Roll legends still touring, to stars of stage and screen, artists, and authors. Over 15% of our homes are also home to home businesses.

No, there is no Starbucks. No Dunkin, no chain stores. But we do have a great town center that serves good coffee from our small supermarket and our community restaurant which for some reason, while serving breakfast, lunch and dinner, is named The Lunchbox. Tradition, I guess. But if you really are a fanatic, Starbucks and Dunkin stores are just a few minutes away.

And Weston is just one of the 167 towns that make Connecticut special, But for all those new Amazon (and Google and Apple) employees, we just have to make it easier for people to get to LIC and home again without sitting behind a wheel stalled in traffic, or crossing a few bridges that are always backed up. We're working on it. Perhaps we can work on it with Amazon together. And that's where the thought of a high speed ferry comes from.

We already have ports and docks and could add more. Sure, it could take anywhere from 3 to 10 years to launch a public/private ferry concept, let alone a running ferry service given the number of CT & NY city, state, and federal agencies that would have to weigh in, not to mention the Port Authority of New York, New York City Department of Transportation, and Metropolitan Transportation Authority. But I'll bet Amazon could speed things right along. And they won't have 25,000 new employees overnight.

It is not a walk in the park to create a new transportation vision. But no new vision is easy to accomplish. And Connecticut, specifically Fairfield County towns, could look at leading and developing an interstate transportation strategy quickly that would benefit our newest regional employer and neighbor.

In fact, many of us believe, and would ask Amazon to consider the Bridgeport waterfront complex as an excellent choice for an ancillary Amazon distribution hub, call center, divisional executive and R&D location. The greater Bridgeport area would provide a motivated workforce and easily accessed transportation hub. It's worth mentioning again, our towns have incredibly good schools, are communities of welcoming people, have homes, both large and small, with lots of lawn or none. We offer choices that LIC just can't.

While an HSC ferry could operate quickly to LIC from multiple docks in CT giving Amazon employees in LIC a much larger choice of community types, Sikorsky Airport (and slightly further up, Tweed airport) would be almost a private air hub for an Amazon complex in Bridgeport. It is virtually "easy on, easy off" I-95 to reach the US interstate highway system, which in Fairfield County, has had major upgrades.

It seems it would be worth the time for Governor-elect Lamont to put together a task force, inclusive of officials in Fairfield County towns, to share with Amazon a plan on how a Bridgeport complex would support and enhance an LIC corporate office. The same for the dedicated ferry service to the LIC Gantry docks. We could ask the help of the senior strategists at Stanley-Black & Decker to assist as they are reinventing Hartford - on their own.

If we don't create our own vision and sell it, no one will do it for us. Jeffrey Immelt and GE threw Fairfield County and indeed, Connecticut under the bus with flat out lies concerning their move to Boston to hide their own strategic and operation failures, and those failures continue to haunt GE-Boston causing our sister state problems. We have everything that Amazon needs as we did for GE.

It's time we re-enter the competitive business world. Governor-elect Lemont promised us this is his goal for our state. Let's help him get there - town by town. As for the BS about Millennials finding Connecticut boring, they get older, want kids, good schools and some peace and quiet while still a stone's throw away from the lights of Broadway. It's easy for all the armchair quarterbacks out there that swear by their "market research" to find fault with Connecticut, they are the same crowd who can't forecast an election or a stock market move. I'll still place my bet on Connecticut and the thousands of smart, creative, innovative, and hardworking people that call it home.

#Amazon #Bezos #LIC #LongIslandCity #Connecticut #Weston #Fairfield #Google #Apple #Ferry #Queens #Brooklyn #Manhattan #TheBronx #StatenIsland #StanleyBlackandDecker #GE