Dr. Robert Gal attended last Thursday’s Village of Lake Success Planning Board meeting because of what he called a “perceived lack of knowledge in the community” surrounding a project at 1111 Marcus Avenue, an office building that includes the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health Care System’s Center for Advanced Medicine.
The Lake Success resident, who is a gastroenterologist at North Shore Hospital, wasn’t alone.
Concerned residents filled the board room at Village Hall last week, as the six-member planning board approved the adoption of an amended version of the state’s environmental quality review findings, despite the recent discovery of potentially dangerous subterranean gases located in the soil underneath the hospital.
The final environmental impact finding statement will allow Winthrop Management LP to expand parking around the 1111 Marcus Avenue building, while a portion of the office space housed within the hospital would also be re-configured to be used as medical facilities.
“It’s being looked at strictly as a legal issue, not as an environmental issue,” Gal said. “They accept the findings as they are, which I can’t fight with. It is what it is. The vote in the village is to vote on the zoning and the variance.”
Village of Lake Success Planning Board member Alan Mindel was the lone dissenter, who voted against the adoption of the amended final impact statement because of what we characterized as too many environmental issues with the site due to the contaminated ground water and gases that reside in the soil below the building.
Although none of the board members disagreed with the need to address the site’s environmental issues, Board President Daniel Axinn said the project needed to be completed to assure that those issues were fixed.
Gal agreed with Axinn’s assessment of the need to complete the project.
“I’m a doctor myself,” Gal said. “I think it’s a safe facility. It’s just that I think that the village needs to understand the whole process, which I don’t think they do.”
The doctor was so convinced of the safety of the building that he said he would currently work there despite.
“Yeah, I would work there because quite honestly the plume’s probably over us right now for all we know,” Gal said of the pollutants created more than six decades ago.
“I think if there were major serious environmental hazards, that would be made public. I don’t think this process has been made public enough though,” he said.
Vincent Lentini, a Lake Success resident who practices law in Garden City, questioned the planning board’s effort to effectively advertise its meetings in regards to the 1111 Marcus Avenue project so that residents could scrutinize the process.
“I wasn’t aware of this until recently,” he said.
Lentini also questioned the liability the village faced with the project.
“Are we going to get sued later on?” he said.
“I know you say this is outside of your jurisdiction, but if the (state Department of Environmental Conservation) is not going to put the importance in I think we need to do it,” Lentini added. “We all live here. Those people don’t live here.”
For resident Jill Madenberg, who is a volunteer member of the village’s environmental commission, her organization could have been used as a valuable tool to help educate residents about the project.
“This is something we really should be working on in tandem together,” she said. “We have people on our environmental commission, who their only intention is to protect the safety and environment of our village.”
Former Village of Lake Success Mayor Robert Bernstein also attended the meeting and was credited by Axinn as providing plenty of work to deal with pollution in the community during his tenure as a local elected official.
Bernstein said he was positive that work is being continued by the village’s current government.
“There is no way in my mind that we are not as a village going to do absolutely everything to continue to monitor and correct this facility,” he said. “It matters not what you vote on tonight. We as a village have always done the best for our residents.”
Reach reporter John Santa by e-mail at jsanta@theislandnow.com or by phone at 516.307.1045 x203
