A controversial 7-Eleven store proposed for Mineola will now get to open after the village Board of Trustees’s last attempt to stop it fell short.
The New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, on Sept. 1 denied to hear the village’s appeal of a New York Appellate Division ruling in April, which said it had to let 7-Eleven open a store at 400 E. Jericho Turnpike.
Village of Mineola Mayor Scott Strauss announced the decision at the village Board of Trustees meeting Wednesday night in a letter to Mineola residents.
The trustees said they still believe, Strauss said, that the Appellate Division was wrong.
“Those people are best able to evaluate issues who are closest to them, not judges from out of town,” the Board’s letter said.
The trustees initially denied the convenience store chain a special-use permit for the store in February 2012.
The location posed too many traffic and parking issues on Jericho Turnpike and Jay Court, the trustees said in the letter, despite 7-Eleven’s expert witness testimony that the store would not hurt traffic flow or property values.
7-Eleven then sued the village in the state Supreme Court, which upheld the denial of the permit.
But the Appellate Division disagreed, ruling the board’s decision was “arbitrary and capricious” because it didn’t have its own expert testimony or other “empirical evidence” for its traffic claims.
The court also noted that trustees and residents said at a public hearing that they were concerned the store’s customers would be “unsavory” and lower property values.
But the Board did not cite any such reasons in its decision.
The main question the board wanted the high court to consider was whether it had to provide its own expert witnesses to support its land-use decisions, Mineola Village Attorney John Gibbons said.
But the Court of Appeals only accepts about 4 percent of its appeal requests, Gibbons said.
The Appellate Division ruling deviated from the court’s precedent.
In a land-use case from August 2014 involving a proposed day care center on Herricks Road, it ruled the Mineola Board could make decisions based on “its members’ personal knowledge and familiarity with the community.”
“If we’re only going to rely on experts and not the common sense judgments of the Board of Trustees, it’s not going to be a good result,” Gibbons said.
The board will now set conditions for 7-Eleven’s permit based on its original traffic concerns, as the ruling said it could.
They will likely address the curb cuts in the store’s parking lot and traffic flow onto Jericho Turnpike, Gibbons said.
Richard Keenan, 7-Eleven’s attorney in the case, said his clients could not be reached for comment.
