Babylon Town to provide $9 million in federal COVID relief to Hispanic-owned businesses

If you have a Hispanic-owned business in Babylon, whether it's a major manufacturer or a mom-and-pop deli, town officials want to know about it.

The town is using $90,000 in federal coronavirus relief funding to launch a new initiative aimed at improving relations between the town's growing Latino population and its institutions.

The Hispanic Outreach Plan calls for a “complete inventory” of existing Hispanic-owned businesses. Officials would then build a database and establish a business network to help the companies access state and local grant programs and other economic development initiatives.

Babylon city officials said the town's Hispanic population has boomed over the past decade, but many business owners aren't members of the local chamber of commerce and often don't know about the town's programs. Officials first became aware of the problem when they were trying to implement a grant program for small businesses during the pandemic.

“During COVID, we found that we couldn't do outreach activities. [with Hispanic-owned businesses] “The relationships we've built with businesses that have been in business for years, this was new to us,” Babylon City Supervisor Richard Shaffer said, “We had to go out of our way to find businesses that understood we were here to help.”

“There was a lot of distrust,” Schaffer added.

On Long Island, the types of Hispanic-owned businesses are shifting from landscaping and construction to law firms and insurance companies, and the town's efforts could help unify those disparate entities, said Miguel Bonilla, vice president of the Salvadoran American Chamber of Commerce in Brentwood.

“We need to be stronger together, rather than trying to cut through the bureaucracy as individuals,” he said.

The program is managed by the town's Rural Development Corporation, the nonprofit arm of the Babylon Industrial Development Agency, which has contracted with Brightwaters Long Island Governmental Relations LLC to manage the outreach effort.

The company's founder and president, Luis Montes, is a former top adviser and lobbyist for Democrat and former Suffolk County Mayor Steve Bellone. Montes was also a former business partner of Babylon Deputy Superintendent Tony Martinez at Pan American Communications LLC from 2010 to 2012.

Montes is a former chairman of the Islip Town Democratic Committee.

Schaffer said Montes was selected for his longstanding work in outreach to the Hispanic community.

Shaffer pointed to census data showing Babylon's Hispanic population is “growing dramatically.”

According to U.S. Census data, approximately 17% of Babylon Town's population in 2010 identified as Hispanic or Latino.

Ten years later, about 24 percent of the town's residents are Hispanic or Latino, according to census data.

Martinez, a Salvadoran immigrant, said it's incumbent on town officials to build relationships within the community, some of the owners having had bad experiences with the government in their home countries, he said.

“In Latin America, some of the governments are not good,” Martinez said. Educating immigrants about government programs and building trust is crucial, he added. “We go out there to educate them about how the city works, and we want to provide opportunities for them.”

Leonardo Estevez, 50, who owns a dry cleaners in Copiague, said being a new store owner has been tough.

Finding architects and other professionals to hire and navigating the town permitting process have been particularly difficult, he said.

“It's hard to do it yourself,” Esteves says. “You have to get the right people, and if you're not familiar with how to do it, you don't know who the right people are.”