Islip Town Board moves to buy property in East Islip for a municipal parking lot

The Town of Islip has plans to demolish a dilapidated home in East Islip to make way for a new municipal parking lot meant to alleviate congestion and traffic problems near a busy ambulance corps headquarters.

At a town board meeting Oct. 13, board members unanimously approved a resolution authorizing the $420,000 purchase of two parcels of land at 191 Carleton Ave. from Robert Sloup, of Medford. The two lots, which make up 1 acre, will yield about 30 to 40 public parking spots, town spokeswoman Tracey Krut said. The costs for tearing down the home and turning the grassy areas into a paved lot have not yet been calculated because the project needs to go out to bid, Krut said.

Islip Town Supervisor Angie Carpenter said the lots are being purchased at "fair market value" and the new municipal parking lot will not only help the overflow from the ambulance corps, but will benefit an adjacent shopping center and area residents.

"The benefit is trifold," Carpenter said in a phone interview. "There's no real public parking around and this will really have a lot of public benefit."

Robert Stadelman, president of Exchange Ambulance of the Islips, said with its membership growing over the past several years to about 100 volunteers currently, the existing 15-space parking lot next to its building between Adams Street West and West Madison Street is too small and gets even more crowded on training and meeting nights.

"You have vehicles all over the place," Stadelman said. "Cars are all over the side streets, residential streets and understandably, our neighbors are not happy about that."

A shopping center housing several businesses across the street is also constantly packed, Stadelman said.

"When you back out of that shopping center, they're backing out, backwards, onto Carleton Avenue," he said. "When we have an emergency, it creates a safety issue for us because our exit also goes onto Carleton. It's a disaster waiting to happen."

Stadelman said he approached the town about a year ago when he saw the property up for sale to discuss the feasibility of turning it into a municipal lot.

"The other piece to this is at some point in the future, we'd like to expand our facility," Stadelman said. "We've outgrown our space. To stay in our current space we'd have to expand, and if we expand into the parking lot then we really have a problem."

The Exchange Ambulance building was constructed in 1990 by the town, Stadelman said, and since then its number of vehicles and emergency calls have doubled, with those vehicles parked on the corps property. Stadelman says the estimated call volume to the corps is projected at 2,800 for 2015, making the need for more parking spaces even greater.