Last June, residents of the Village of Great Neck turned out by the hundreds with only a few days notice to take part in a write-in vote to try to rid our village of its mayor.
hose voters and their votes bore witness to the fact that what happens in our village is a blueprint for bad governance. The mayor paid two attorneys with our tax dollars to watch the vote count (the canvas) and be ready to intervene should he lose.
It is commonplace to say that a village board of zoning appeals and a planning board are quasi-judicial and therefore beyond the taint of a mayor’s opinion, yet the mayor appoints the members of the boards, who are beholden to him for their positions and their re-appointments.
The mayor also hires the law firm that provides these boards with legal counsel, and the law firm’s lawyers are in situ at every meeting of every board, fitting legal advice, one might say, to a mayor’s inclination or the firm’s.
Take, today, just one example of what has been happening at the two boards invested with the duty to husband the landscape of the village we call home.
Since last November, the planning board has been hearing the application for a subdivision of 10 houses in the inaccessible woodland between Old Mill Road (in the Village of Great Neck) and Clover Drive (in Great Neck Estates).
Prior to that, the BZA approved a site plan and variances for a private road inside the woodland that has no external access and that does not meet New York State Fire Code. We protested at the time to the BZA, but to no avail.
The subdivision application process at the Planning Board has proved us right, that the cul-de-sac road was inadequate all along.
Since arriving at the planning board last November, the developer has been jiggling the dimensions of the road. In fact, the roadway dimensions have been revised three times. At the planning board’s meeting late in March just weeks ago, the developer promised a yet-again revised site plan deliverable before the next planning board meeting on April 24.
In 2012 and 2013, and this year, the opposition of residents to this development in a woodland adjacent to a wetland has increased with each attempt by the developer to swindle the process.
The March hearing at the planning board unveiled yet another trick. The attorney to the developer told the board that they were beyond the 120-day limit set by the state for their deliberations.
He threatened the board that if they did not immediately close the hearing on the proposed subdivision, he would invoke the law that bestows default approval.
The board’s attorney agreed with the developer’s attorney and advised board members they had no choice but to close the hearing immediately, abruptly, and without further public input, comment, or information.
Two attorneys agreed on the law. (A regular occurrence, no doubt.) Two attorneys representing incompatible interests agreed on the law…. Two attorneys representing incompatible interests agreed on the law despite what the law reads. (Irregular, and suspect.)
New York State law reads: “The hearing on the final plat shall be closed upon motion of the planning board within one hundred twenty days after it has been opened.”
An alliance of the two attorneys forced the board to close the hearing before a “final plat” has been received by the board.
That March evening, before everyone went home, the village engineer did point out to the board that the drawing of the plat he most recently received (two days prior to the March meeting), and the plat he had yet to receive in April, were incompatible with the plat that initiated the planning board hearing on the subdivision.
He asked, rhetorically, which board, the BZA or the Planning Board, would reconcile these various dissimilar plats. In response, the planning board’s attorney advised them not to worry their pretty little heads about it.
The transcribed record shows that the village engineer was not alone in noting that the board would be closing the hearing before he even sets eyes on the final plat. We residents also lodged an objection: The law’s time frame, we said, rests on a “final plat.” We contended that the 120-day clock is set in motion by a plat that is “final.”
The hearing was shut down, illegally perhaps, and under a cloud. The developer will be free to submit who-knows-what plat for a major subdivision in our community with who-knows-what-dimensions that allows who-knows-what violations of village and state law. The collaboration of the attorneys achieved, for one thing, a circumnavigation of the Open Meetings Law. Henceforth, everything about this subdivision will be in the dark.
The law firm, from whose lips this apocryphal advice issued, has its contract renewed yearly by this mayor. Like the tenure of members of boards, the mayor’s power of selection exerts its own force.
This is a small thing, you might say, a mistake, a mistake lingual as much as legal. But if it is a mistake, it is surely not small.
Like the mayor’s mistake last year when he did intense behind-the-scenes maneuvering on behalf of the developer of the 7-Eleven to be built at the corner of Steamboat Road and Middle Neck Road.
Like the mayor’s mistake when he backed a developer’s construction of a white elephant of a building on Steamboat Road, a building that undermined the road itself, and the sidewalk, more than two years ago. The mayor has yet to call the developer to account to repair the road despite entreaties from Nassau County.
With term limits voted away, a mayor hostile to his own fellow residents can continue to run this village without a sense of community, wreaking destruction until he is finally divested of ownership. Meanwhile, we residents witness a village where even the law is treated as just another commodity, useful for trade or transgression.
Rebecca Rosenblatt Gilliar
Great Neck
