Mineola Mayor Scott Strauss said in a speech Tuesday night that the village has been able to make substantial improvements while keeping tax increases to a minimum.
In his annual state of the village speech at a meeting of the village’s Chamber of Commerce at the Morgan Parc apartment complex, he also discussed the impact COVID-19 has had on the village and area businesses. He said the village had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
But the mayor said village was able go ahead with projects because businesses that have been developed recently such as Morgan Parc and Modera Metro Mineola entered into community benefit agreements, contracts between developers and municipalities to provide local amenities or mitigations to the neighborhood.
Strauss said such agreements have allowed $2 million to be put into Memorial Park, home of Nassau County’s second-biggest amphitheater, which has been hosting events weekly since the renovations.
“People come up, we have people coming from all over just to hear these bands,” said Strauss. “We are way past where we were before because we deserve to be better than that and we are better than that.”
Funds from community benefit agreements have also led to improving the village’s water system, which has 52 miles of mains. A new Water Department building on Westbury Avenue is on its way as well as a new firehouse to replace one that had to be torn down because of a truss in the roof becoming too unstable.
The cost of these projects was $26 million, the mayor said. With the help of grants, and a persistent effort to find money, Strauss said, all the changes came with a tax increase of 0.75% to taxpayers.
“There is money out there, and we are going to do whatever we can to find it and bring it home,” the mayor said.
In discussing revenue lost because of the coronavirus epidemic, Strauss said an example was the decision to stop issuing parking tickets because of residential streets clogged up from the influx of college-aged children bringing extra cars into the village, and the lack of anywhere to go during quarantine.
“We decided to stop it. We weren’t writing the tickets because everybody was home, you couldn’t go anywhere,” Strauss said. “The kids from college were home so instead of having one or two cars in somebody’s home they had all cars home and we didn’t think it was fair to enforce that so we got rid of all of that.”
Strauss also commended the efforts of the municipal workers, modifying Village Hall hours in order to keep it “open for business” as he put it, when other areas were closed down.
Strauss said he runs the town to run the town, not to get elected again. He said this is his backyard too, and mentioned the time he, as well as the rest of the trustees, have spent in Mineola.
“We are doing what I think we believe to be the right decisions,” he said to applause.
Strauss also said that some issues are more or less out of Mineola’s control and are up to the state or county. The mayor emphasized the issue of traffic and construction in the area whether it be the Long Island Rail Road’s third rail project, National Grid or the Harrison Avenue Parking Garage, which was slated to be completed in July 2020.
Strauss said he is doing everything he can and contacting everyone he can to get those problems fixed, but told audience members he knows they can handle it.
“We’re all New Yorkers, we’ll get through this,” the mayor said. “We can get through anything.”
