The office space and parking structure at the longtime Village of Lake Success corporate headquarters of Canon U.S.A. Inc. could soon be updated.
With the international digital imaging and advanced office solutions company set to move from the Lake Success headquarters it has kept for 41 years to a newly constructed complex in Melville later this year, the company that manages the facilities at 1-3 Dakota Drive and 4 Ohio Drive said this week the updates would be necessary to find new tenants to occupy the soon-to-be vacant office space.
“Canon is moving out and we’re going to need to replace them,” said attorney A. Thomas Levin of the law firm Meyer, Suozzi, English & Klein P.C., which represents the company that rents the Lake Success complex.
“In order to do that,” Levin added, “we’d like to upgrade the buildings and improve the facility altogether to make it more rentable and more attractive.”
The Village of Lake Success Board of Trustees on Monday declined to approve a change-of-use application to allow Jericho-based We’re Associates to market the singularly occupied Canon headquarters to multiple perspective tenants.
“(We’re Associates) went before the board (on Monday) looking for a change of use of those buildings,” Village of Lake Success Mayor Ronald Cooper said. “Those buildings were single use and they’re looking for a multiple use.”
“I think from their perspective they are doing what they need to do,” Cooper said of We’re Associates. “The village needs to consider the implications of what they’re doing and that’s what the board will do in the next month or so.”
Before this week’s meeting, We’re Associates had already received approval from the Village of Lake Success Planning Board and its Board of Zoning Appeals to create new “parking decks” at Canon’s former headquarters complex, Levin said.
“We want to build parking decks to replace two of our parking lots between the buildings and that will give us more spaces, not up to current code, but we don’t have to come up to current code,” Levin said. “It will be more than we have now.”
Levin said the proposal does not have to meet current Lake Success code because We’re Associates currently is operating under parking requirements agreed upon with the village when the building was completed in 1971.
“We’re grandfathered,” Levin said. “We can keep doing what we’re doing forever. We don’t really think we need to (appear before the board of trustees), but we’re here and we’re not going to fight with them over it.”
That also goes for the We’re Associates change-of-use proposal for the building, Levin said.
“Our agreement is for ‘offices,’” the attorney said. “We predate the current code where they make a distinction for medical offices.”
Although Levin said We’re Associates has the ability to maneuver around the current Lake Success code, the company is dedicated to fostering the best possible outcome for its own interests and those of village residents.
“We have had a series of approvals,” Levin said. “This is the last one in the line that we want to upgrade the property so that we can enhance renting it to new tenants.”
There are currently no prospective tenants interested in taking over portions of Canon’s headquarters complex at 1-3 Dakota Drive and 4 Ohio Drive, Levin said.
We’re Associates President Gary Wexler said Canon told his company it would be vacating its Lake Success headquarters by April 30, 2013.
“They just gave us the nine months notice, which they had to give,” Wexler said. “They gave it on July 31.”
Canon, which opened in 1955 with five employees, moved to its Lake Success headquarters from Woodside, Queens in 1971, a Canon news release said.
When it moved to Lake Success 41 years ago, Canon had grown to include 80 employees, the news release said.
The company now employs 11,000 people in facilities across North and South America, the news release said, with 1,200 employees currently working at Canon’s Lake Success headquarters.
Canon’s new Melville headquarters will be housed in a five-story, 700,000 square-foot office building, which is located on a 52.17-acre parcel of land near the southwest corner of the Long Island Expressway South Service Road and Walt Whitman Road, the news release said.
The process for We’re Associates to find new tenants for Canon’s Lake Success headquarters has not yet begun, Levin said.
“We haven’t even started because we didn’t get the official notice until July of when they were going out, so it made it tough to rent it,” Levin said.
Having the change-of-use application approved by the Lake Success board of trustees would also help the process move along, Levin said.
“If we can’t get going on what we can fix it up for, it’s hard to sell it to people without being able to tell them what they can do,” the attorney said.
The future rental of the complex once Canon leaves will be made possible through a financing agreement between We’re Associates and the Nassau County Industrial Development Agency, Levin said.
“The property becomes owned by the Industrial Development (Agency) and leased back to us,” Levin said. “It’s tax exempt and we make an agreement to make a payment in lieu of taxes, and over a 10-year period the taxes get phased back in up to 100 percent.”
Cooper said the agreement is something that trustees will have to study in the net couple of weeks.
“We have to understand, based on our own code, how this whole thing is going to effect the tax structure of the village,” Cooper said. “Until we understand that, we are going to reserve decision.”
But Levin said We’re Associates has been paying an unfair portion of taxes to the village for some time.
“Our position here is we’re paying way more in taxes here than we should,” Levin said. “We’re assessed almost $20 million more than the county assesses us. So it’s a lot of money for that.”
Although through the agreement with the county IDA the village may initially lose tax revenue, Levin said the plan will pay dividends for Lake Success in the future.
“If we don’t do this taxes are going to go down because the buildings are going to be devalued and we can’t rent them for the same rent,” Levin said. “If the income of the building goes down, the value of the building goes down.”
If the value of the building goes down, the assessment goes down, the taxes go down,” he added. “They’re going to go down anyway, but at least with our plan they’re going to go back up.”
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