Critics of Gyrodyne subdivision plan say town's environmental review is flawed
The Smithtown Planning Board in March approved Gyrodyne's plan to subdivide its mostly undeveloped 75-acre property in St. James. Credit: Newsday / John Paraskevas
After Gyrodyne won subdivision approval from Smithtown for its 75-acre St. James property this week, opponents of the plan assailed the town's environmental review as flawed.
"The Planning Board completely failed to address our very legitimate concerns regarding the significant legal deficiencies in the environmental review,” said Joe Bollhofer, a member of St. James-Head of the Harbor Neighborhood Preservation Coalition, in an email Thursday.
Smithtown’s five-person Planning Board on Wednesday voted unanimously for preliminary subdivision approval with no public deliberation after more than two hours of comment. The former defense contractor’s application seeks to divide its property into eight lots for uses such as a hotel, assisted living and medical offices.
Subdivision is not necessary for development, but it could ease the task for company officials who told Newsday in 2017 they planned to sell the company’s assets and unwind assets by 2018. Town officials say they have not received any applications for development at the site, and a prospective buyer backed out of a $16.8 million deal last year to buy nine acres.
Catering facility Flowerfield Celebrations, located at the site, will not be altered by the subdivision and its operations will continue.
Bollhofer, a lawyer and chairman of zoning board of appeals for Head of the Harbor, a small village to Gyrodyne’s north, said at Wednesday night’s virtual hearing that a traffic study conducted as part of environmental review — which predicted a manageable increase in volume — ignored testimony Gyrodyne’s own traffic expert gave more than a decade ago that predicted commercial development would cause vehicle counts on area roads to skyrocket. Bollhofer also faulted the town’s environmental review for discounting the cumulative impact of nearby development including at Stony Brook University.
Smithtown spokeswoman Nicole Garguilo, in an email, said the Planning Board is “an autonomous board with a legal responsibility to review the actions and subdivision applications before them as well as the recommendations of the planning department. They have a process to follow, which they did.”
Gyrodyne president Gary Fitlin did not respond to requests for comment. A company lawyer said Wednesday the traffic expert's testimony was about land the company once owned in Brookhaven, not about its Smithtown holdings.
In an interview Thursday, Assemb. Steven Englebright (D-Setauket), whose district abuts Gyrodyne, criticized the Planning Board’s “lack of apparent objectivity, or even interest in what members of the community wanted them to pay attention to.”
Those concerns, which have shifted little since the company opened its application in 2017, center on the belief that its plans threaten to destroy a bucolic corner of the North Shore through increased traffic, pollution and unsightly concrete. “When it’s gone, it’s gone — we’ll never get it back,” said Arlene Goldstein, a St. James artist.
Reprising their long-standing opposition to the project Wednesday night were Brookhaven Supervisor Edward Romaine and Head of the Harbor Mayor Douglas Dahlgard, who represent constituencies near the Gyrodyne site but have had no oversight of the Town of Smithtown land use matter.
Gyrodyne representatives said Wednesday they were careful to mitigate any negative impacts from development by including in their designs a vegetative buffer along North Country Road, forbidding left turns into and out of a complex entrance, and other steps. The company found some allies at the hearing, including Matthew Aracich, president of the Building and Trades Council of Nassau and Suffolk Counties, who said he looked forward to hundreds of well-paying construction jobs, without offering specifics. Natalie Weinstein, founder of the civic group Celebrate St. James, said successful Gyrodyne development would be a boon for the hamlet’s Lake Avenue business district.
Englebright held out hope that New York State could preserve the land through a proposed environmental bond fund set to go before voters in November. That fund could hold $4 to $6 billion, but he did not know how Gyrodyne’s leadership would respond to a purchase offer, he said.
