Brookhaven Lab Added Over $51 Million to the Long Island Economy in 2006

February 5, 2007

UPTON, NY - Brookhaven National Laboratory purchased $51.2 million worth of supplies and services from Long Island businesses in fiscal year 2006, a period from October 1, 2005 to September 30, 2006.

In addition to Brookhaven's buying goods and services from Long Island vendors, most of the Laboratory's approximately 2,600 employees live in Suffolk County and shop on Long Island. All told, employee salaries, wages and fringe benefits account for almost 57 percent, or $279.5 million of the Laboratory's total annual budget of about $490 million.

Owned and primarily funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Laboratory creates and operates major facilities available to university, industrial and government personnel for basic and applied research in the physical, biomedical and environmental sciences, and energy technologies.

In fiscal year 2006, Brookhaven's total procurement budget was approximately $189 million. Out of that amount, the Laboratory spent about $36.5 million on 397 purchases in Nassau County, and $14.7 million on 2,656 purchases in Suffolk County.

Mary-Faith Healey, manager of Brookhaven's Procurement and Property Management Office, which handles purchasing for the Laboratory, said, "The Laboratory values local suppliers who understand the unique requirements of doing business on Long Island while meeting the Laboratory's dynamic needs."

Brookhaven's top three local vendors in fiscal year 2006 were E.W. Howell Co., Inc., of Woodbury; LiRo Engineers, Inc. of Syosset; and KC Electronic Distributors, Inc., of East Setauket. By far the largest amount in FY2006, more than $32.7 million, was paid to E.W. Howell for construction of two new buildings on the Laboratory site. Some $8.5 million was paid for building the Laboratory's 65,000-square-foot Research Support Building, and the balance of $24.2 million was spent on the 94,500-square-foot Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN).

The total cost of the Research Support Building was $18.2 million. The new building consolidates frequently visited administrative and support functions in a single location to provide more efficient administrative services to Brookhaven employees and visiting scientists.

The CFN is an $81-million facility that will greatly enhance scientists' ability to investigate the properties of materials at nanoscale dimensions, typically on the scale of billionths of a meter, or 10,000 times smaller than a human hair. The facility is due to be commissioned in May 2007.

The Laboratory contracted to pay approximately $1.3 million to LiRo Engineers, Inc., for providing architectural engineering support for the Laboratory's major construction initiatives, including the Research Support Building, the CFN, and the National Synchrotron Light Source II. The proposed new light source will be a state-of-the-art facility in which scientists will use x-rays that are 10,000 times brighter than those used at Brookhaven's current light source to probe a variety of materials. Such capabilities may lead to advances in numerous scientific fields.

Brookhaven paid about $1.1 million to KC Electronic Distributors, Inc., for electronic equipment, including a variety of cables, of which some were custom-made, for the house-sized STAR detector. STAR is one of four detectors at the Laboratory's premiere accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which collects and evaluates an enormous amount of data generated by RHIC's particle collisions. At RHIC, scientists from around the world are attempting to understand the properties of matter as it existed micoseconds after the Big Bang.

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