Brookhaven Lab Added Over $32 Million to the Long Island Economy in Fiscal Year 2008
December 16, 2008
UPTON, NY — Brookhaven National Laboratory purchased more than $32.5 million worth of supplies and services from Long Island businesses in fiscal year (FY) 2008, a period from October 1, 2007 to September 30, 2008.
In addition to Brookhaven’s buying goods and services from Long Island vendors, most of the Laboratory’s employees live in Suffolk County and shop on Long Island. All told, employee salaries, wages and fringe benefits amounted to $322.2 million, or 60.7 percent of the Laboratory’s $530.9 million budget in FY 2008.
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.
Brookhaven’s total procurement budget in FY 2008 was approximately $175.9 million. Out of that amount, the Laboratory spent about $5.8 million on 508 purchases in Nassau County and $26.6 million on 3,001 purchases in Suffolk County.
Don Rawlings, manager of Brookhaven’s Procurement and Property Management Office, which handles purchasing for the Laboratory, said, “Brookhaven Lab’s expenditures contribute significantly to the local economy. We strive to do business locally not only with big companies, but also with small businesses whenever we can. In addition, the Laboratory’s spending creates new jobs locally.”
Brookhaven’s top three vendors on Long Island in FY 2008 were Rockmore Contracting Corporation of Smithtown; Construction Consultants-Long Island, Inc., of Port Jefferson; and Roppelt Electrical Contractors, Inc., of Blue Point. Rockmore Contracting received approximately $5.8 million for two construction projects, which included a 11,000 square-foot expansion of computing facilities used for physics research conducted at Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Switzerland. Rockmore also built an 8,400 square-foot materials-handling facility, which is used for inventory and shipping and receiving materials and supplies.
Construction Consultants-Long Island received over $1.5 million for office renovations for a 60-year-old building. Other renovations included making a seminar room out of an outdated training area and modifying six bathrooms so that they are compliant with the American Disabilities Act.
The Laboratory paid Roppelt Electrical Contractors over $1.3 million for installing the power distribution system for the electron beam ion source project, a new pre-injector system currently under construction to facilitate physics research at RHIC and biological research at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory, located at Brookhaven. The project’s scheduled completion date is 2010.
2008-10879 | INT/EXT | Newsroom
