Home Delivery

No Trump at Jones Beach hearing on LI

BY BILL BLEYER | bill.bleyer@newsday.com

6:40 PM EST, January 18, 2008

Article tools

E-mail

Share
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
- Facebook
- Fark
- Google
- Newsvine
- Reddit
- Yahoo

State officials have decided not to shift a hearing on a basement for Trump on the Ocean to Long Island, rebuffing local officials and civic leaders who argued that it was unfair to hold the session in Westchester Feb. 5.

Developers Donald Trump and Steve Carl on Tuesday filed a new application with the Department of State for a variance to build the same basement under their 350-seat Jones Beach restaurant and catering facility that was rejected last month by a state review board. They need the variance because the state building code prohibits basements in flood plains.

Some Nassau officials and organizations said it made more sense to have the five-member board come to Long Island than have people who want to speak on the application travel to Cortlandt Manor.

But state department spokesman Eamon Moynihan said Friday that "as we did in December, we have decided to proceed with the regularly scheduled meeting. Another variance request will be on the calendar that day in Cortlandt Manor [approximately 70 miles from Jones Beach]. Keeping to the schedule serves the purpose of treating all petitions equally."

Nassau County Assessor Harvey Levinson, a critic of the project who has tried to get the state to move the hearing to Wantagh Senior High School, was not happy.

"I am extremely disappointed that the state is, once again, ignoring the homeowners in Wantagh by not including them in the process," he said. "Westchester may be convenient for the board of review, but the location creates a hardship for the hundreds of residents who would have attended the hearing in Wantagh. Homeowners have the right to be heard at a hearing in their own community."

The regional hearing boards meet every other month. Moynhian said the new application was filed too late to have the hearing before a Long Island board this month. The next available hearing is in Westchester.

The developers have said they wanted the first available hearing, wherever it was, because construction is already two months behind schedule.

Jay Kranitz, general manager for Trump on the Ocean, said Friday that "it's not our decision. Wherever the department chooses to hold it, we will abide by that."

Those involved with the variance process say they are occasionally granted for basement in floodplains. Moynihan said, for example, that "in recent years, a number of variances were granted for one-family dwellings constructed in the Town of Amherst, outside of Buffalo. There has not been a directly analogous case involving a coastal zone."

Pat Friedman, of Garden City South, founder and chairwoman of the Nassau County Nonpartisan Tax Revolt Coalition, has said if the hearing proceeded in Westchester she would organize buses to get opponents to the session.

"It's obvious that the New York State Department of State doesn't care about the citizens of Long Island," Friedman said.

The variance application seeks approval to build a 26,710-square-foot basement, making the building 70,000 square feet.