The hearing on Feb. 19 at the Village of Great Neck on the mayor’s proposed zoning changes for Middle Neck Road and East Shore Road was simultaneously videocast by streaming, but there was no video of the final half hour.
Starting at 7:30 p.m., the meeting went on late into the night as residents one after the other spoke their concerns into the hearing record. The trustees then adjourned to an executive session for “advice of counsel.”
At this point, the young man running the camera for the live streaming went home, as did almost all the residents.
I stayed. When the trustees came out of executive session, the village clerk spent some time trying to resume the video. He was unsuccessful.
Below is a description of what transpired after they were back in their seats (the mayor and three trustees, two attorneys, the head of the Building Department, the former head of the Building Department who is the mayor’s consultant, the village clerk, the assistant village clerk, and the head of the Department of Public Works).
Peter Bee, the village attorney, spoke first. He addressed the board and gave a short review of the agreement they had reached behind closed doors.
They were in accord that their corridor plan presented by the consulting firm VHB should be set aside in favor of a revised plan. Bee gave a few examples of the topics that had moved the board to this decision: five-story buildings, traffic, the two roadways in one plan.
The mayor thought they could end the public hearing then and there, revise the plan, and start a hearing on the revised plan immediately. The board discussed whether to end the hearing at the beginning of the meeting on March 5 so they could open a new hearing on the revised plan on the same night.
I was included in the discussion, so I pointed out that rushing from one hearing to the other hearing without a breath between would once again shut out the residents.
Bee provided a valuable wrinkle.
The law requires 10 days advance notice to the public for a hearing. Since the mayor wants Bee to do the revision of the plan, and with the meeting date (March 5) only two weeks away, he would have only four days to accomplish the overhaul of the plan. In addition, they would then have to submit pro-forma paperwork to the Nassau County Planning Commission.
The mayor said (he thought) people had spent the evening complaining without offering ideas. My response was to say that he had handed the community a fait accompli, and he had thereby put us all in the position of trying to make him see the folly in the design of his corridor plan.
He had scheduled just one night for the hearing, and this confirmed the impression he was not seeking ideas.
Earlier in the evening during the hearing, I spoke first, and then last. Both times at the microphone I weighed in on the subject of “process” (so essential, so lacking in glamour). I said we were making a legal record, that a hearing is different from a regular meeting, and I gave the example that a meeting has open time when the imposition of a three-minute limitation is acceptable whereas in a hearing it is not.
I also brought up the matter that the so-named Citizens Advisory Committee had functioned in violation of the open meetings law of New York state. It met privately, and the mayor barred residents from sitting in and hearing the committee’s deliberations.
The first time I spoke the mayor savaged me a bit, but the second time my words were unmolested, and here, later, in the remnant of the public hearing well after midnight, the topic of discussion was most definitely process.
As for the mayor’s 11th-hour change of mind, one reason might be the mayors of two neighboring villages, Kensington and Thomaston. On behalf of their respective boards, they expressed their non-support for the East Shore Road portion of the mayor’s plan. Their displeasure, offered as it was by one of them in public, underscored what residents were saying by the hundreds.
With the East Shore Road segment presumably gone, any changes to the Middle Neck Road corridor plan would be due to the outpouring of sentiment at the microphone, delivered as some truly eloquent and sentient statements by the residents.
It is yet to be seen if alterations to the Middle Neck Road Corridor plan will be merely cosmetic — “a bone to a dog,” as one resident put it later.
At the hearing, I distributed two handouts, 125 copies of each. I didn’t have enough.
At the VHB presentation two weeks earlier on Feb. 5, the impetus for the plan, according to the mayor, was the need for lots of new apartments, to answer to what turned out to be a non-existent “housing crisis.”
By the Feb. 19 hearing, the mayor had a new impetus for his Middle Neck Road corridor plan: It is a financial necessity for the village, the mayor said: Without it they will have to raise taxes.
Village residents are doing an in-depth examination of the mayor’s plan, and it is neither our housing nor our taxes that drives this plan. There is an underlying attempt, written into the changes to the village zoning code, to give the board of trustees freedom to approve anything they want to approve.
Protest all they might that they will safeguard our suburb and our homes, they want a zoning code that give them unprecedented power and holds them to scout’s honor, cross my heart and hope to die, which is certainly not a suitable standard for elected officials.
In this revision of the zoning code on behalf of interested parties, the legislative body (the board of trustees) is giving the executive body (the board of trustees) unimagined power.
Among those powers is the ability to sell off, and trade off, village property to developers. Here lies one hidden cost of the mayor’s plan and the changes to the zoning code. The schools and the parks will not be the only casualties.
We went home close to 1:30 a.m.
Rebecca Rosenblatt Gilliar
Great Neck
