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Arcabascio leans on biz laurels for beep

Arcabascio leans on biz laurels for beep
Photo by Christina Santucci
By Rich Bockmann

After spending 34 years building IT systems for companies like Merrill Lynch and North Shore-LIJ Health Systems, Republican Tony Arcabascio said he has learned a thing or two about building a thing or two, and he wants to bring his hands-on, pragmatic approach to Borough Hall.

“You don’t need to be a legislator at this level and this position,” he said earlier this week during an interview at the offices of the TimesLedger Newspapers. “You need to be someone who understands the job and understands when you’re dealing with businesses and how to get them here, when you’re dealing with health care and how to get them to expand and build facilities, or when you’re dealing with telecommunication companies or utilities.”

Arcabascio styles himself as a moderate Republican who can work with unions, governments and the private sector to get results for Queens.

At 53, he has spent nearly three decades overseeing the information technology components of construction projects — a laudable achievement by a kid from Jackson Heights raised by immigrant parents from Italy who spoke no English.

After graduating from Mater Christie High School, he got a baseball scholarship to Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., where a friend offered him a summer job earning $400 a week at General Electric.

“I took the job, really knew nothing about it. But I started to learn computers and that’s how I got involved,” he said.

The one less-than-pragmatic decision Arcabascio cops to is taking a year after college to play Minor League baseball, but that came to a end when he got a more lucrative job offer.

“I said, ‘OK, this isn’t going to work, because I’m getting $800 a month when I was making $400 a week.’ I can do the math so I said this isn’t going to work,” he explained. “I said, ‘You know what? My future is probably going to be more in computers than it is going to be in baseball.’”

Later in his career, a job with Merrill Lynch exposed Arcabascio to the Urban Enterprise Zone in Jersey City, N.J., and he thinks the same incentives can help grow businesses in industrial areas of Queens, such as Maspeth, Astoria and Jamaica.

“I think South Jamaica, because of the transportation infrastructure down there, might even be a great theater district at some point. Because we need an area that is centrally located where it’s accessible,” he said. “Not only accessible to people in Queens but accessible whether it be from the Rockaways, coming from Long Island, coming from the city, coming from different areas.”

With his background dealing with communications companies, Arcabascio said he sees opportunities to negotiate for discounts for seniors the next time the city renegotiates the franchises granted to cable utilities.

Arcabascio, whose first name appears as “Aurelio” on the ballot, made his first foray into politics was last year when he garnered 13.6 percent of the vote in a failed bid to unseat state Sen. Michael Giannaris (D-Astoria).

On education, Arcabascio said charter schools are not the answer to a broken system and administrators should do more to get parents involved. He is bearish on new hospital construction, but said healthcare providers can easily expand their networks of urgent care centers, multi-specialty facilities and imaging centers. And on development projects such as Willets Point and the USTA Center, he said more could have been done to get better community benefits.

“It’s not enough to go in and say this is what we want,” he said. “I believe you get one shot at things and if you want people to take you seriously, you have to do your homework. You have to collect your data; you have to put together your plan; you have to submit it and say, ‘This is what we need, because this is the data that substantiates it.’ That’s my hands-on approach to things.”

Reach reporter Rich Bockmann by e-mail at rbockmann@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4574.