Owner to request fewer parking spaces at Woodbury Plaza

The owner of a Plainview shopping center plans to seek a variance to provide fewer parking spaces than required at a location that houses a popular grocery store and retailer and has been a source of concern over traffic accidents.

The town suspended the construction of a 4,200-square-foot building at the Woodbury Plaza shopping center, home to more than a dozen stores including a Trader Joe’s and a Gap store, in November after determining that the original calculations for required parking were not correct, town spokesman Brian Nevin wrote in an email.

Nevin said planning and development commissioner Elizabeth Maccarone identified a miscalculation in the number of required parking spaces that had been done by former commissioner Frederick Ippolito when the permit was issued in 2014.

The owner, Manhasset-based C&B Realty #3 LLC, is seeking a variance to allow 557 spaces at the shopping center when 624 are required. The Oyster Bay Zoning Board of Appeals will hear the request at a meeting Thursday night.

“What happened is new math,” Thomas Abbate, Woodbury-based attorney for the owner, said in an interview Wednesday. Abbate said the original calculations included retail space but not storage space, and that the revised calculations include storage space as well.

The new building is being constructed on the shopping center’s parking lot, thus removing parking spaces. The new building would house a Verizon store and a B.Good restaurant that would join existing tenants, Abbate said.

Traffic at the shopping centers at the intersection of South Oyster Bay Road and Woodbury Road — including Woodbury Plaza — has long been a concern in the community.

In December, town Councilwoman Rebecca Alesia wrote ZBA chairwoman Arlene Van Loan about her concerns regarding traffic there “due to a large number of accidents.”

“Residents have expressed deep concerns regarding future growth at Woodbury Plaza and suggest that additional development will only make an already untenable and dangerous situation worse,” Alesia wrote. Alesia and others have called for a traffic study and possibly the installation of a traffic signal at the southern entrance to the shopping center.

Abbate said his “clients are all for it, and for the extent it’s deemed feasible, we’ll partake readily.”