Village of Roslyn Board of Trustees; (Left to Right) Sarah Oral, John Durkin, Marshall Bernstein and Marta Genovese listening to revised plan for multi-family complex.
Amit Ben-Bassat
The Village of Roslyn’s Board of Trustees unanimously approved a 45-unit multi-family building on vacant land on the north side of the Viaduct on Tuesday, July 15.
During the board’s Tuesday meeting, the project architects presented the trustees with a revised proposal for a building with a decreased overall scale. This included an up to 100-square-foot reduction in the building’s footprint, a parking lot reduction of over 5,000 square feet, and a lower height, with the entire top level of the original proposal being removed.
The project’s team, under Albertson Avenue LLC and Kroplick Realty LLC, stated that the unit’s construction will bring financial benefits to the village, creating new jobs for building and maintenance. One representative of the project noted that no monetary benefit has been fully calculated at this time, but the village could potentially receive a $1 million bonus.
“I think it’s so compelling to have housing for people in this community who want to live in this community and can’t afford it; this absolutely does help,” said village Mayor John Durkin. “I know it’s a significant impact, and I know it will help tremendously for people trying to move into Long Island, and I welcome them.”
The board’s decision to approve the legislation will move the project’s application to the next phase, which requires approval and a permit from the county and its building department.
During the board’s discussion, all members expressed appreciation to the developer team for considering their notes, particularly with the aforementioned scale reduction, and for maintaining consistent communication throughout this project, which was discussed at board meetings over the course of 10 months.
The project team came with poster boards depicting the new design for the building. Trustee Craig Westergard commented on the building’s shift to look more attractive and less like an office, as he had suggested in previous meetings.
“They’ve made a tremendous effort to keep all this foliage and really treat this property as good as it can be done,” said Westergard. “I just tried to get them to make the building look more sensitive as a residential building than a commercial building, and I really think that they achieved that. At the end of the day, would I rather not have a building there? Yeah. But when we go through this process, they have the right, it’s their property, they have the right to develop the site. And I think they’ve done a good job.”
The July 15 evening meeting in the village hall saw numerous civilians, some from different coalitions, come out to voice their concerns and questions regarding the project. One main topic for discussion was its potential environmental impact, given its scale and higher construction.
One resident referenced the recent flooding in the New York City metropolitan area and New Jersey, with water overtaking numerous streets and subway stations. Parts of New Jersey have reported 6.51 and 5.34 inches of water, with Nanuet, N.Y., reporting 5.03 inches.
The resident raised concerns on the recent events coming to Long Island with natural disasters showing an incline due to climate change, asking if the new complex could potentially see a drainage size increased from the standard five inch to an eight inch, which will allow the property to hold more water in case of extreme rainfall.
Village Attorney John Gibbons explained that while these concerns are fair, the decision for the property’s drainage scale follows the county and its building department. The county and its building department will tell the owners the size, which typically is five inches, and they must follow that requirement. In the situation, they raised it to 8 inches; they will have to follow that decision as well. Mayor John Durkin also later added that in his 30 years residing in the village, he has typically only seen at most 1 inch of rain.
Discussion around this new multi-family complex continues a trend across the island, with villages seeing a new rise in their population, and thus talks have begun around rezoning and land utilization for new family-accommodating property, with villages like Flower Hill discussing potential community outcry over these large projects, such as in the village of Manorhaven.
