Ernie Fazio, the Centerport resident who spent decades pushing Long Island to think bigger about transportation, energy, and economic development, died March 13, 2026. He was 86.
Born in Howard Beach on December 29, 1939, Fazio built a life that crossed more professional lines than most people manage in two careers. U.S. Coast Guard veteran. AT&T lineman. Insurance salesman. Radio host. Author. He graduated from Queensborough College and served as a regional steward for the Communications Workers of America. Each role, by all accounts, got his full attention.
But it was his 24-year run leading Long Island Metro Business Action, known as LIMBA, that defined his public legacy. He took the helm of the Suffolk County-rooted nonprofit in March 2002 and held the position until his death. LIMBA, founded in 1968, connects local businesses with government officials to work through infrastructure problems and investment opportunities. People inside that world described Fazio as “an extremely influential leader and advocate,” according to Long Island Press.
He wasn’t there to attend luncheons.
Fazio waded into fights. In the early 1980s, he stood with other businessmen against local opposition to keeping Islip’s MacArthur Airport open and expanding its operations. That airport serves Suffolk County commuters to this day. He also pushed hard for electrification of the Long Island Rail Road Ronkonkoma line, lobbied for a high-speed ferry to Connecticut, and spent years advocating for a bridge connecting Long Island to the Connecticut shoreline. These weren’t modest asks. Fazio had a habit of proposing things that made people uncomfortable before they made sense.
Wind power on Long Island got his early backing too.
Nothing, though, captured his imagination quite like the Maglev system, a high-speed train that uses magnetic levitation instead of conventional rails. He turned that obsession into a book: “Maglev America: How Maglev Will Transform the World Economy.” The title signals exactly who Fazio was. He didn’t think small. He didn’t look at a regional transit problem and stop at the county line. He saw Long Island’s infrastructure challenges as a piece of something much larger, national and economic and worth a serious argument.
That argument got national attention.
In a MyLITV interview conducted a few years back, Fazio traced his scientific curiosity directly to childhood. “I’ve always had a penchant for science; my father and my uncle invented things, and I’d sit on the bench as a kid, and I would watch these guys, and I saw they were having a wonderful time,” he said. “I was interested in not only them, but what they were doing.”
That bench in Howard Beach, apparently, never really left him.
He also built a second life as a writer and broadcaster. Through the 1990s, he hosted two radio programs: World of Ideas with Ernie Fazio on WHPC at Nassau Community College and Earnestly Speaking on WLIX in Islip. He contributed regularly to area publications. In 1995, Long Island Business News gave him its Front Page Award. Throughout that decade, the same publication ranked him among the top 100 most influential people on Long Island, a list that tends to skew heavily toward elected officials and real estate developers. Fazio wasn’t either.
He was a lineman who read widely, organized workers, got into radio, and then decided Long Island needed a magnetic levitation train and a bridge to Connecticut. The Transportation Research Board has long catalogued the kinds of regional infrastructure proposals Fazio championed, the sort of projects that live in reports for decades before a state budget finally makes them real, or doesn’t.
Fazio understood that timeline.
He spent 24 years showing up to LIMBA meetings, pressing county executives and town supervisors to think about the next generation of Long Island infrastructure, not just the next election cycle. That kind of sustained, unglamorous advocacy work rarely gets the credit it deserves.
He was preceded in death by the era that shaped him, one in which a kid from Howard Beach could work a phone line for AT&T, join a union, go back to school, and end up writing national policy arguments about trains that don’t touch the tracks.
Fazio is survived by the Centerport community he called home and by the questions he kept asking about where Long Island goes from here.