Village of Roslyn officials Tuesday approved the site plan and special-use permit to transform Nassau Suffolk Lumber’s Roslyn offices into a new two-story mixed-use space with retail on the first floor apartments on the second.
After nearly six months of public hearings without a resolution, the village’s board of trustees came to an agreement with the owners of the property at 7 Lumber Road that would allow for revamping the building.
“This project will enumerate what the applicant plans to do and what mitigations we plan on taking and what value will be derived from the project to the village which would determine what the applicant will construct or not construct on the site,” Village of Roslyn Mayor John Durkin said.
Roslyn officials previously tabled a decision regarding the site plan and special-use permit until a more detailed site plan could be provided by Lumber Earth Realty LLC, the property’s owner. The company is owned by contractors Kevin Dursun and John Santos, who is also a member of the village’s historic district board.
Officials have said their primary concerns about the site plan had to do with the lack of available parking along Lumber Road.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Durkin said Santos, Dursun and their attorney, Vincent Apicella of Murphy & Lynch, P.C., agreed to a list of conditions for the site plan to gain village approval.
Among the conditions were that Santos and Dursun dedicate to the village a parcel of land for public parking, create a boardwalk area along the property and put $50,000 toward the village’s parking trust fund.
In other business, the board of trustees tabled a decision for granting a special-use permit to real estate agent and property owner Anna Michailidis of KAM Associates, for her daughter Eleni to rent space at 1390 Old Northern Boulevard to open an orthodontist’s office.
The proposed orthodontist’s office would call for three clinical rooms and a records room, with Eleni as the office’s sole doctor.
Trustees said they were unlikely to approve the proposal because the village’s downtown area is typically used for retail stores and restaurants, receiving a high volume of patrons and maintaining a desired nightlife aesthetic.
“As policy, this is what we’ve been doing for years now,” Trustee Craig Westergard said. “This has really been the policy because it reinforces retail use in the community, and it’s kind of difficult for us to say yes to you when we’ve been saying no to people for some time.”
Officials said the doctor’s office would require a constant use of parking spaces that have become a scarcity in the area.
“I’m hoping that other areas in the village could be used for parking too, but it is definitely a concern of mine,” Michailidis said. “It’s just so hard to find space that’s conducive to this kind of area.”
Michailidis said the office would be busiest between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m., when the children she’d treat would be out of school and the downtown area would not be at peak business hours.
Michailidis said she’d treat approximately 20 patients per day, rather than the nearly 50 patients treated by multiple doctors in her current office, in an effort to provide more personal care.
Harry Nicolaides, an architect who had recently been unseated after 17 years as mayor of the Village of Munsey Park in Manhasset, said the addition of similar practices to more heavily-used areas had been beneficial.
“It isn’t going to have the negative impact you think it does, and I do think that there’s plenty of information that shows this type of use does stimulate a populated area,” Nicolaides said. He said he attended the meeting as a family friend of Michailidis.
The Michailidises agreed to have a traffic study of the area conducted once the school year begins to determine how much parking would be needed and how busy the area gets. A final decision regarding the property will be made once the results of the traffic study are reported and analyzed, trustees said.
Finally, the board of trustees rejected a proposal to remove five trees described as “perfectly healthy” from the Hillcrest Avenue home of resident Oscar Pozo.
Pozo said he had little interest in removing the trees, but wanted a record of the proposal’s rejection in the event a future storm led to the destruction of the trees and damage to his neighbors’ homes.
