Kreitzman’s 7-Eleven plans threatened

The Island Now

On Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2012, at the conclusion of the evening meeting of the Board of Trustees, Mayor Ralph Kreitzman, flush with self-congratulations, informed his fellow trustees of the arrival of a 7-Eleven store in the Village of Great Neck.

Two small problems attended the mayor’s message: A final hearing on variances for a 7-Eleven by the village Board of Zoning Appeals was not due until two days later, Oct. 4, and the BZA is supposed to be an independent, quasi-judicial body whose deliberations are self-contained and beyond the damage of political influence. 

When the BZA did convene two days after the mayor let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, it quickly adjourned to executive session “to take advice of counsel,” behind closed doors. The board communed privately for an hour. When the five members resumed their places on the dais in the village hall, telltale signs gave rise to speculation among residents that members of the board, in that marathon executive session, had been brow-beaten to the mayor’s point of view, expressed by him publicly two nights earlier, that opposition to the 7-Eleven, so palpable in the village, was to him a phantom, a myth.  

While hearing the case for zoning variances to accommodate a 7-Eleven at 788 Middle Neck Road, the BZA, by law, had submitted the application it was considering to the Nassau County Planning Commission. Sometimes the planning commission returns an application to the local authority with no recommendation. 

In the case of the 7-Eleven, however, the planning commission, by a resounding 8-1 vote of its nine-member board, rejected a 7-Eleven store in Great Neck, with a list of reasons. 

The planning commission’s decision, dated Sept. 6, 2012, came with a legal boomerang: Normally a BZA needs a simple majority of three to approve an application, but the planning commission disapproval put into play the requirement for a super-majority, the votes of four of five BZA members, to grant variances.

So several weeks before their Oct. 2 and Oct. 4 meetings, the mayor and the BZA knew the Planning Commission opposed the 7-Eleven, but they did not divulge this information to residents at either meeting. 

A few resourceful residents did uncover news of this in time for the Oct. 4 meeting, and Ofra Panzer questioned the BZA about the planning commission’s condemnation of the 7-Eeven application. 

In a pincer response, BZA Chair Dennis Grossman would not allow the planning commission’s resolution to be read aloud or its contents elaborated on, and BZA attorney Steve Limmer (who serves both the mayor and the BZA and is therefore an obvious conduit, if not a courier, between them) told residents we could obtain the county document only through a FOIL request. 

The BZA would neither share the resolution with the public nor suffer any discussion of it with or by the public. 

Mayor Kreitzman and Chariman Grossman seemed to sing a similar tune two days apart. The Mayor, on Oct. 2, shouted his demand that Elizabeth Allen tell him the number of residents opposed to the 7-Eleven.

“‘How many!… How many!’” he badgered her, “but he was not really asking,” Elizabeth said later. Mr. Grossman, on Oct. 4, rhetorically asked resident Peter Shaer, “You are only representing yourself,” even though the letter he was reading from his father re-introduced a petition with 150 signatures against the 7-Eleven. 

The Mayor’s question “How many” does have an answer: About 200 residents have proclaimed their opposition to the 7-Eleven, thus far. So in a village whose population is 10,000, more people have registered their well-defined apprehensions about the 7-Eleven than voted for Mayor Kreitzman: he was re-elected with 129 votes. 

The BZA did receive a letter from the owner of the apartment complex across the street encouraging the board to approve variances for the 7-Eleven, but residents of those apartments declared, in person, they were implacably opposed. “The owner does not speak for the residents,” Julia Shields told the BZA.

The Nassau County Planning Commission’s overwhelming rejection of the 7-Eleven put political plans into overdrive. 

In private, the Mayor and the agent/applicant Kris Torkan  appear to have hatched a strategy: Mr. Torkan would refurbish the police booth on the DPW village property on Middle Neck Road and also build a brand new police booth directly across the street at the 7-Eleven. 

The evidence of the mayor’s private trading in the public’s business came to light when the BZA was presented with two letters, both dated Oct. 1, from Nassau County Police Commissioner Thomas V. Dale to Mayor Kreitzman and to Kris Torkan just in time for themMayor’s trustee meeting on Oct. 2. In the letters, the Police Commissioner tenders his “support of Kris Torkan” and congratulates the mayor on “facilitating” Torkan’s offer to pay for two police booths and two speed detectors. With these letters (I obtained by FOIL), the application before the BZA for a 7-Eleven became re-engineered for approving police booths worth “a million dollars” in the Mayor’s words.

Mr. Torkan’s attorney submitted the Police Commissioner’s letters to the BZA on Oct. 4. 

The letters even offer to draft legislation and husband approval for the gifts through the Nassau County legislature. So now the Nassau County Police Department, its pleasure and potential displeasure, was added to all the factors which are not supposed to have any sway in a BZA ruling, let alone to force variances despite there being no persuasive reason to grant variances. 

As one member of the BZA, Victor Habib, put it, can every business on Middle Neck Road have a personal police booth just for the asking?

In perspective, this is an application by someone who has no “hardship” under the law but instead has well situated friends. Article 7, section 712-b of New York State Village Law defines “permitted action” by a BZA, which I read to the BZA. Attorney Limmer tried to gull the board by offering his opinion that I was reading from “the wrong law.”

Semi-finally, and this is stunning, the applicant of record is Exxon-Mobil, asking for variances on behalf of someone else, Mr. Torkan, who in turn is a champion for a 7-Eleven. This has to be a first in the annals of the BZA, an application for variances to enable the owner to sell the property rather than use it, even though, strictly speaking, Exxon-Mobil is seeking a “use variance.”

Finally, during the last decade or more, Exxon-Mobil as the owner of a gas station at the corner of Middle Neck and Steamboat roads, caused a brownfield, a contaminated site. We residents have to contend with a polluted parcel in our midst and a plume of gasoline and oil flowing on underground streams, threatening our aquifers and the safety of our water supply. The hardship is ours.

We shall see how the BZA weighs the evident cost to the community, the cost to the nearby residential neighborhoods, to the small businesses the 7-Eleven mega-chain would compromise, and the potential cost to the pedestrians put at risk by a 7-Eleven with too many curb cuts, an insomniac’s hours, and an endless supply of beer and wine.

It was reported that the BZA had two votes for, two against, and one undecided. 

But now the county planning commission’s thumbs down begets that super-majority of four, which, hopefully, is too many votes for the mayor to commandeer.

 

Rebecca Rosenblatt Gilliar 

Great Neck

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