The Village of Lake Success Board of Trustees this week approved a request made by the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health Care System to convert warehouse space to medical offices, along with the accompanying environmental review, for its 1111 Marcus Avenue facility.
Despite the discovery last year of potentially dangerous subterranean gases and contaminated ground water in the soil berneath North Shore-LIJ’s Center for Advanced Medicine, Lake Success Mayor Ronald Cooper said moving the project forward was a positive development.
“It’s gone through a rather torturous route through our system,” Cooper said of the project following Monday’s board of trustees meeting at Lake Success Village Hall. “It was a very difficult application for a number of reasons and, yes, overall I think it’s beneficial to get that property on the right path.”
The board of trustees voted 6-1 to approve the State Environmental Quality Review Act findings for the project, which village consulting engineer Kim Gennaro said was based upon the environmental-impact-statement documents prepared for the building.
Lake Success Deputy Mayor Stephen Lam provided the lone dissenting vote on the SEQRA approval resolution.
“It’s part of the decision of the board adopting the SEQRA findings,” the mayor said. “There are areas of mitigation in those findings that the applicant has to comply with and from an environmental point of view. We believe that all the issues have been resolved on whatever environmental issues are there.”
The 94-acre 1111 Marcus Avenue site was originally constructed by the U.S. Government in 1941 to be used as a plant for Sperry Gyroscope, which manufactured weapons used during World War II.
Since then, the site has been used for various enterprises. It served as the original home of the United Nations and in 1951 was sold to a series of military contractors, including Lockheed Martin.
After Lockheed sold the property in 2000, it was redeveloped as a mixed-use complex that includes Cablevision’s public access studio, and the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
An environmental impact study associated with North Shore-LIJ’s project last year turned up contaminants such as tetracholoride, which causes cancer and liver damage, to isopropylamine, butanone, acetone and dichloromethane at 1111 Marcus Avenue.
Attorney William DiConza, who is legal counsel for Winthrop Management LP., which is developing the 1111 Marcus Avenue site, said he environmental issues with the building have been addressed.
“Now that you are occupying an old industrial building you are paying a lot more attention than what was paid to it back in the day when they were making weaponry or gyroscopes there,” DiConza said. “We’re actually leading the clean up.”
The process of cleaning up the 1111 Marcus Avenue site is also important for North Shore-LIJ.
Nearly a decade ago, the Village of Lake Success Planning Board authorized North Shore-LIJ to construct its Center for Advanced Medicine at the site, where services include outpatient mammography, radiology and other oncology treatments.
Since learning of the original environmental concerns at the 1111 Marcus Avenue site, property owners have installed several systems to deal with the contaminated ground water and gases, including”sub-slab” depressurization systems installed in 2007, said Dr. Kevin Phillips, an environmental and aquatic engineer retained by the village during a Lake Success Planning Board meeting in December.
“The hospital, naturally, would never bring a patient into an area that isn’t safe,” said Stan Sibell, the attorney for North Shore Hospital. “We’ve had our own experts review the entire project. We monitor everything we do environmentally.”
In addition to the environmental review of the project, trustees also approved the creation of an additional 500 parking spaces in the parking lot around 1111 Marcus Avenue, along with the reconfiguration of a portion of the office space housed within the hospital.
“Interior-wise, the space will be developed from industrial warehouse use to medical and office usage,” DiConza said.
For approving the new configuration of the site, the Village of Lake Success will receive a $1 million payment from Winthrop Management LP on or before Sept.1 2012, along with another $1 million payment within the next five years, Cooper said.
In addition, the village will receive an annual payment of $100,000 from the building’s developers.
“The payments were really an offer by the applicant,which occurs many times in these types of cases, to offset the costs that the village will incur as part of the application being approved,” Cooper said.
The payments will be used to offset costs incurred by the village police department and through added usage of roadways in Lake Success, Cooper said.
“We’re very relieved,” DiConza said of the completion of the project. “It was a lot of work, but it was a very important property. It was probably one of the most important properties left to be occupied and we’re very happy that the hospital is going to be able to grow and some new tenants can come in and grow.”
In addition to the Lake Success board of trustees and planning board approval, the project was also reviewed and approved by the Nassau County Planning Commission.
“This is a thrill for us because now we can get in with the second half of our cancer center,” Sibell said. “That’s most important for us.”
