By Sarah Ibrahim
The Village of Roslyn Board of Trustees unanimously voted to approve the construction of two medical facilities Tuesday night: the Roslyn Village Veterinarian and a Quest Diagnostics patient service center.
The Roslyn Village Veterinarian facility will be a restoration of a building damaged after a car chase last summer.
On July 18, a high-speed chase in which the Nassau County police pursued a speeding vehicle resulted in the vehicle crashing into Roslyn Village Veterinarian.
Peter MacKinnon of Humes & Wagner, LLP., representing veterinarian Dr. Mario Vezza, said “the building was uninhabitable and structurally declared unusable.”
Since that date, Vezza has been practicing in a temporary trailer.
The plan for Roslyn Village Veterinarian is to preserve the building, which the Historic District Board deemed historic, MacKinnon said.
The structure must be rebuilt and the goal is to make the building more efficient and up to date, MacKinnon said. There will also be some structural additions as well as a larger parking area.
Vezza has owned and practiced with Roslyn Village Veterinarian since 1991.
Quest Diagnostics applied to take what is currently a closed frozen yogurt bar, Go Greenly, located in a strip mall and turn it into a patient service center.
The move to Roslyn was both for the expansion of the business and a desire to benefit the village, a representative of Quest Diagnostic’s architectural firm for the project said
While Quest Diagnostics is still awaiting a building permit, with this approval from the Village of Roslyn it expects the site to be up and running by June or July.
The four patient rooms are expected to have a low impact on the shopping center, the firm representative said.
Both construction applications had previously been approved by both the Historic District Board and the Zoning Board of Appeals. Before the approval of both applications, Mayor John Durkin said he “rarely disagrees with the decisions made by the HDB and the ZBA… as they do a do a good job and are very thorough with their research.”
