The owners of the Shop Delight supermarket in Great Neck Plaza continue to struggle in their attempt to obtain a conditional-use permit to operate a butcher shop with outside partners three stores down on Welwyn Road, with village trustees seeking clarity on the differences of ownership between the two operations.
Village Attorney Richard Gabriele said at Wednesday’s Board of Trustees meeting that the board wanted documentation of ownership for both Shop Delight and the proposed butcher shop because of the supermarket’s failure to adhere to its conditional-use permit.
“By reason of the situation at Shop Delight, they have certain concerns about how this new location would be operated and the ability to control the operation,” Gabriele said. “The basis of those concerns is that the similarity or overlapping of interest in the current location to this new location.”
Edward Yakupov, one of the owners of Shop Delight, and his attorney, Paul Bloom, first appeared at a Plaza board meeting on Jan. 6 seeking approval for a conditional-use permit to “relocate” the supermarket’s existing meat department into an empty storefront on Welwyn Road.
The proposal was met with criticism by trustees, who cited consistent permit violations at the supermarket related to food truck deliveries and safety concerns.
At the Feb. 3 meeting, Gabriele asked Bloom to return to the board with documentation addressing the trustees’ concerns regarding a comparison of ownership between the proposed butcher shop and Shop Delight, food delivery information including frequency of deliveries, identity of deliverers, what they deliver, delivery times and size of trucks and if Yakupov would fund a code enforcement officer either through the store or through the village.
At Wednesday’s meeting, Mike Karam, who is part-owner of Shop Delight with Yakupov, told the board they were not majority owners of the butcher shop operation.
Karam said he and Yakupov sought and found professional butchers to partner with them and operate the store full-time.
“These two butchers, who are going to be the partners of the company, they will run the operation,” he said. “Shop Delight will no longer service meat, we are going to be servicing the customers from there.”
Bloom said he did not understand why the board needed to see percentages of ownership because they are two separate legal entities.
“There is no one individual that has a controlled interest in either one of the entities,” he said. “There are new investors, new operators, new parties who are going to be part of that operation because it is now, as you have saw in the presentation, a very upscale type of operation as opposed to what you find in the supermarket.”
Plaza Trustee Gerry Schneiderman said knowing ownership details of both operations could help alleviate the board’s concerns with the supermarket’s permit compliance.
“The people that are involved with the supermarket, which we’ve had numerous complaints and problems with, are also the principles, or some of the principles, that are involved in this,” Schneiderman said. “If they can’t behave themselves with the supermarket, why should we think they are going to behave themselves with this?”
Deputy Mayor Ted Rosen said if Yakupov and Karam were not majority partners of the butcher shop, then the board would prefer the majority partners to appear in front of it before deciding on whether to grant the conditional-use permit or not.
“If you’re telling us that the people who are going to control the new operation are not [Karam] and [Yakupov], I think we cannot continue to hear this until these gentlemen come before us,” Rosen said. “And we have to make a determination as to what they’re going to tell us.”
Village of Great Neck Plaza Mayor Jean Celender said that in addition to ownership details she wanted to see the supermarket conform to its conditional-use permit requirements.
Celender said the applicants said they would control deliveries during unrestricted hours and keep the area around the store clean.
“I don’t see it happening,” she said. “I didn’t see it happening in the last two months and I didn’t see it tonight when I went around back and looked at it.”
Bloom and Karam both said the butcher shop would be able to control deliveries better than the supermarket because it would only be receiving fresh meat deliveries and not the abundance of deliveries Shop Delight receives for items like produce, dairy and baked goods.
“We only have limited deliveries from limited vendors,” Bloom said.
The board voted to adjourn the application until the April 20 meeting for the applicants to return with the requested materials.
Also at the meeting, the board voted to amend a section of the village code to strengthen fines and repercussions for businesses or builders who fail to adhere to permit requirements granted by the board.
Bloom coined it the “Shop Delight Law.”
“This is something the board requested to be drafted because of places within the village and applications in which we needed additional abilities to ensure that we get compliance with all of the permits and approvals we grant,” Celender said.
Gabriele said the amended law targets three separate areas of non-compliance with village requirements.
First, he said, allows the board to withhold the issuance of a permit if the applicant still owes fees to the village prior to approval.
Gabriele said the second aspect of the law allows the board to hold hearings if there have been material misrepresentations in connection with a permit or conditions imposed in connection with a permit. The board can then impose penalties including a probationary period, adding conditions to the permit or revoking the permit.
The final part of the amended law, he said, increases fines for non-compliance with permit conditions.
Businesses that violate their conditional-use permits would pay a fine of up to $350 for a first offense, between $350 and $700 for a second offense and up to $1,000 for third offense and all subsequent offenses.
The next board meeting is on April 20.
